Jeff,
I’m not buying it. A one liner in a blog post that says “Probably take a trip through the OS kernel. Often take a hardware exception.” isn’t enough proof to say why exceptions are s o slow, especially when the rest of the things that definitely happen explain most all of the performance issues with exceptions.
Yeah, you shouldn’t use exceptions in performance intensive code, that we know. Perhaps you should trace the entire execution of a few types of exceptions (C#, C++, SEH, hardware) to actually see what happens.