Problem with PDO exceptions

Hello, I have MySQL 5.1 and PHP 5.2. For some reason PDO is not throwing exceptions when I give it a broken SQL query. For example: try { $stmt = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM foobar WHERE 1"); } catch(PDOException $e) { error($e->getMessage()); } In this example there is no table called 'foobar', so this should give an error. Yet, it doesn't. Any ideas why that would happen? Possible causes I can think of: 1) PDO decide to "emulate" prepared statements. 2) PDO has some sort of "errors off" setting. 3) My try-catch statement is wrong. I doubt it's (1) because I have MySQL 5.1 and PDO is only supposed to emulate prepared statements for MySQL versions prior to 4.1. And phpinfo says that I'm running pdo_mysql version 5.1.30. Btw, $db->exec() and $db->query() also fail to produce an error when I give them a broken query. That's another reason why I think that the problem is elsewhere. Any ideas? Thank you very much for your help. Best, Daniel.