>Throwing exceptions will give you that same functionality but I personally think that object instantiation should always work unless there's truly an exceptional failure.

Rick is absolutely right. Many developers write code that instantiates the object at the same time it is declared.

Dim myObj as New myClass(1, True)
myClass myObj = new myClass(1, true);

And a lot of this kind of code is outside of a try/catch block so any exceptions in the constructor will probably get bubbled up higher than intended.