While we're on the general topic of problems that can arise with error messages, have you ever tried what happens if a database connection fails? Here's what just happened to me after I wiped the DB for a reinstall (as the modules didn't show up in the Admin panel after installation, I suspect I was still in the middle of a short_tag cough issue there) and refreshed the page for plain curiosity to see what'd happen.

http://codesatori.com/hosted/dolphin_7_no_db_connection.png

Not quite sure see more what happened, but I assume there was a gigaton of information in the buffer that was output, and there was so much of it coming in that my browser froze and had to be manually killed from Task Manager... And I had to kill Apache as well to get the processing to finally stop (this shot my CPU usage to the roof and kept it there). It looks like every variable in the system was in the process of being dumped on-screen, and possibly code from some included files was coming in too. You can look at the scrollbar to get an idea of how much data was flooding in.

Cont'd...