title: Windows Service installation fails - Configuration system failed to initialize exception
body: <p>I am truly confused.  Everytime I try to install my windows service, using InstallUtil.exe, I get the error below:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Exception occurred while initializing the installation:
    System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Configuration
    system failed to initialize.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The general advice is:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>"inside the "configuration" element, the first child must be the
    "configSections"</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>In order to just try to get past the error message, I completely stripped my App.config down to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?&gt;
      &lt;configuration&gt;
      &lt;/configuration&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But the same error persists.  It's like the installer is completely ignoring the newly empty App.config file, and I am thoroughly confused as to how to overcome this.</p>
  
  <p>This is attempted to be installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 - code written in C# 4.0.  Can anyone recommend a direction to look?  TIA</p>