Ahem.
Funny, I just got done ranting about this sort of thing elsewhere.
Empty catch blocks are EEEVIL, EEEVIL, EEEVIL! Unless you're sure of what you're doing; there are some exceptions which we won't go into here. Any time you're not 100% sure what how to deal with an exception, do
not ignore it. Replace this with:
Chances are good you will now see an error message here, giving a clue what the problem is. You never want to hide such an error message. Later on, for more user-friedly programs, you might log the error message to a file somewhere instead, and pop up a nicer looking message to the user instead. But e.printStackTrace() is a good quick default for now.
[ October 02, 2003: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]