ConfigurationErrorsException thrown on service start when no whitespace between </value> and </setting> by David Nadle

Was banging my head for a couple of days on the exact same issue as Jon Parker's.
I have no problems using aspnet_regiis.exe to encrypt my Studio 2008 app.config files.
Studio 2010 however, gives me Unrecognized element 'setting'.
I would appreciate any workaround or better yet a fix.

So, for me this has been a problem with decrypting the settings using aspnet_regiis.exe

The fact that you won't fix it is a serious concern for me. There is no workaround for this because it's the encryption process that removes the whitespace.

I've been banging my head on the wall over this issue for two full days. My issue was even harder to debug because my settings file is encrypted and so the whitespace difference is not immediately apparent by looking at the XML. Searching online for the exception's message didn't lead me to here because it's not mentioned anywhere on this page, so I hope this comment gets indexed so that other people can find the error and understand the root cause:

[System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException] Unrecognized element 'setting'

This affected my WinForms application: I was manually encrypting the user settings node and since the default for the XmlDocument.PreserveWhitespace property is false, they were encrypted without whitespaces. When accessing the encrypted configuration file using ApplicationSettingsBase (a.k.a Settings.settings), the lack of whitespace threw the exception.

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