Einar,
Oops. My mistake. The error was actually being thrown outside the try/catch routine because I was trying to change the connection string while the connection was still open (1st line of code below).

oSQLConn.ConnectionString = cConnectionString;
try
{
oSQLConn.Open();
return oSQLConn.State.ToString();
}
catch
{
return "Failed";
}

Thanks for your help!

BTW: In this thread you mentioned "Throwing the error back on the stack". Would this cause the error to be caught by the next applicable Catch routine?

Todd