Is there a reason for the "@" symbol in your connection string? However, the code seems to work in principle. Does the ASP application have read permissions over the folder that the file is in? If you step through the code in debug mode, can you see where the error is thrown? I'm puzzled as to why it does not seem to be making use of the code in the catch statements, especially as you are catching generic exceptions. What code is at line 25?