I think dialogs are the main problem.
Vin Miller says sys(2335,0) is the key to this.
Is that what you were thinking of?

>>We run a large set of services from this service manager, so
>>if one SQL connection string is wrong as given us or setup by
>>someone else or etc, we get a dialog holding everything up.
>
>I know there's an option to keep connection dialogs from popping up on errors: if I can find this, would it solve your problem, or are there more classes of problem to deal with?