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Ok, I added a new page to an existing application running on a dev server. &nbsp; There is a string of special characters I added as one of the appsetting values in the web.config. &nbsp;The new page reads this string and performs a function to dycrypt it to a password which it needed for other functionality. &nbsp; Everything is working great in DEV. &nbsp;<br />
Today we moved the page and the web.config settings to QA. &nbsp;Now there is a problem. &nbsp;The app wont even load. &nbsp;Getting a messsage 'There is an invalid character in the given encoding line 31 position 34. &nbsp; This is the first special character in the new appsetting value. &nbsp; I verified that the header of the web.config in both DEV and QA match: &nbsp; &lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;utf-8&quot;?&gt;. &nbsp;I also verified the special characters are the exact same on both servers.<br />
So why would the special characters load ok on one server and not the other? &nbsp; 
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Ok, I added a new page to an existing application running on a dev server.   There is a string of special characters I added as one of the appsetting values in the web.config.  The new page reads this string and performs a function to dycrypt it to a password which it needed for other functionality.   Everything is working great in DEV.  
Today we moved the page and the web.config settings to QA.  Now there is a problem.  The app wont even load.  Getting a messsage 'There is an invalid character in the given encoding line 31 position 34.   This is the first special character in the new appsetting value.   I verified that the header of the web.config in both DEV and QA match:   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>.  I also verified the special characters are the exact same on both servers.
So why would the special characters load ok on one server and not the other?   

Receiving Invalid Character message from web.config file when asp.net app loads

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