I believe that the following code was inserted to fix [Seaside Issue 636](https://code.google.com/p/seaside/issues/detail?id=636) for GemStone (presumably works for 2.4 and 3.x). In 3.x GemStone went with ANSI compliant exception handling and that's when the bug showed up. I'm assuming that this code came in with Seaside-Core.gemstone-dkh.752