alt Hacker NewsHeck, my experience lately has been that recruiters (or independent headhunters) are completely up front with the salary range explicitly because they don't want to waste anyone's time... and because there -- in tech especially -- can be enormous ranges of compensation for similar responsibilities.
That matches my experience - and I'd treat a failure to give a straightforward answer as a strongly negative signal, and would immediately concentrate my efforts on other opportunities.
I suspect we're pretty lucky in tech, though. Anecdotally, I've heard that in fields such as sales and marketing it's much more the norm to treat potential new hires in a much more adversarial manner.