🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi all, i'm experiencing another very strange problem - hopefully someone 
will be able to point me in the right direction.  Basically I have a project 
that has several thread, one of which is used to poll and detect the 
presents of a USB token.  So it basically sits in a constant loop:

void __fastcall TKeyPollThread::Execute()
{
   SetName();
   while (!Terminated)
   {
      GetTokenData();
      Sleep(500);
   }
}

when the token is detected (within GetTokenData) I need to either play an 
audio file (33k embedded resource snippet) or play a double beep on the 
computers speaker.  If there is a sound card pressent, i'll play the audio 
file if not, i'll do a double beep.  I determine this by calling 
wavOutGetNumDevs like this...

           // GetTokenData....
            try                              //*
            {                                //*
               if (waveOutGetNumDevs() == 0)
               {
                  Beep(650, 150);
                  Beep(875, 150);
               }
               else
                  PlaySound("HW_INSERT_WAV_VIS", HInstance, 
SND_ASYNC|SND_RESOURCE);
            }      //*
            catch (...)                 //*
            {                              //*
               Beep(250, 5000); // *
            }                             //*

Now, what is really, really strange is this: I had to include the try... 
catch (indicated by //*) because the code was KILLING my thread.  In each 
execution of GetTokenData() i have a routine Beep so i can hear it polling. 
Now if i run this code / app on a machine that does NOT have a sound card I 
would hear the double beep then the thread would die, dead!  It didn't die 
on the waveOutGetNumDevs() because I could hear the double beeps but I 
didn't hear the Beep from within the catch, it just died.  Now, if I place 
the try..catch as I have shown above(//*), if works fine, I hear the double 
beep, no secondary beep from the catch and the thread does not die.

Does this make sense?  Does anyone have any ideas?  I know everyone will 
say, what is the catch statement returning (in terms of errors) but the 
simple answer is nothing - because I'm not getting that caught beep.  It 
just seems that by including the try catch i have somehow prevented the 
crashing of the thread whist still catching nothing.  What I'm basically 
saying is without the try.. catch the code kills the thread, with it in, it 
doesn't, BUT it doesn't catch anything either!

Thanks in advance,