I am running into an issue I had before; can't find my reference on how to solve it. Here is the issue. We encrypt the connection strings section in the app.config for our client application using code below: config = ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.None) If config.ConnectionStrings.SectionInformation.IsProtected = False Then config.ConnectionStrings.SectionInformation.ProtectSection(Nothing) ' We must save the changes to the configuration file.' config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Modified, True) End If The issue is we had a salesperson leave. The old laptop is going to a new salesperson and under the new user's login, when it tries to to do this we get an error. The error is: Unhandled Exception: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: An error occurred executing the configuration section handler for connectionStrings. ---> System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Failed to encrypt the section 'connectionStrings' using provider 'RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider'. Error message from the provider: Object already exists. ---> System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: Object already exists