exceptions: slow?

Slow? Well, ofcourse they are slower than your basic if(error), since it has to pass control to the exceptionhandler, but i think that''s a small price to pay for having a decent chance of recovering from a fatal error.
If the speed of a handler is a problem to you, there''s something seriously wrong with your code, since as you stated, it''s only called when something blows.

Exceptions are expensive to trigger, and cheap to not trigger. In other words, use all the try..catch blocks you want. But use exceptions to signal events that you don''t expect to happen very often, where if the event actually occurs, a drop in framerate is the least of your concerns. For instance, if you were making a software rasterizer, you wouldn''t want your fragment shader to throw an exception if the Z-buffer test failed.

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"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke

Exceptions are not slow. Throwing is but that will rarely occur during game time. You expect that exceptions will not happen. If they do, you need to recover from that error. If exception is thrown during load time, you will tell user that level couldn''t be loaded (or engine initialized). In either case throw will cause penalty of no more tha percentage of second.

Exceptions are advanced error handling method. You won''t be using them that often. I use them in loading times where speed is not that neccessary and if they do happen while your game is active you will pause and deal with that error.