Reading an application's configuration file

[crackajaxx]

I've hunted for a while so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on
this problem for me.

I have an application (not a web-app, in fact this is an installed
service) that relies upon its application configuration file to provide
it with sensitive information. In this case, the application is
talking to a website that requires credentials that are not the same as
the user that the application runs as (again, its installed as a
service).

I wanted to create a protected section inside of my file which is
foo.exe.config. I tried first by leveraging what was already available
in aspnet_regiis, but none of the options I gave it ever resulted in it
changing the configuration file (I did name it web.config just for
kicks with no luck). So I decided if that wouldn't work, the next best
thing would be to write a small app that reads the configuration file
and protects the sections I want. This actually works well, to a
degree...

The configuration file has specific section handlers. Well those
handlers are part of the assembly that is the executable that I am
configuring. In 90% of the cases, the tool that configures these apps
does not reside in the same location as the tool that it is trying to
configure. The result that the configuration loads, I reference a
section and I get an exception because it cant resolve the type needed
to handle the custom section. If I move the config tool to the same
location as the target executable it works as expected. I'd prefer not
to go down the road of trying to make CAS do what I want since that
would entail minimally ensuring that CAS includes the target executable
path as part of the search criteria.

What bugs me is that the MSDN documentation indicates that when
"designer" apps fail to load a section, they fallback to
DefaultSection. This would make life trivial for me if I could
actually have it fallback to this type. Does anyone know if you can
programmaticall y do this?

== Jaxx