Chris Brumme explains how exceptions really work in Windows. This is an amazingly detailed piece that covers everything you could ever want to know:

Have you noticed that the C++ exception you throw is often a stack-allocated local? And that if you explicitly catch it, this catch is also with a stack-allocated object? Did you ever wake up at night in a cold sweat, wondering whether a C++ in-flight exception resides on a piece of stack that’s already been popped? Of course not.

In fact, we’ve now seen enough of SEH to understand how the exception always remains in a section of the stack above ESP (i.e. within the bounds of the stack). Prior to the throw, the exception is stack-allocated within the active frame. During the first pass of SEH, nothing gets popped. When the filters execute, they are pushed deeper on the stack than the throwing frame.