Managed Provider: The data protection operation was unsuccessful.

Question

We just attempted to deploy a new .net 4 web application with the beta managed provider. When attempting to open a new connection, we hit this exception:
The data protection operation was unsuccessful. This may have been caused by not having the user profile loaded for the current thread's user context, which may be the case when the thread is impersonating.
Is there an app pool setting in IIS that we need to change to get this to work? Locally it works fine, so I'm assuming it's some type of permissions issue.

Answer 1

I could provide you with a test case, but honestly it's as simple as it gets - just a blank web forms app that includes the managed provider! Here is the code I have to open the connection:
using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Data;
using Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client;
public class CatalogDB : IDisposable
private readonly OracleConnection _conn;
private OracleCommand _oCmd;
private OracleDataAdapter _oDA;
private DataTable _dt;
public CatalogDB()
string connString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["connCBSProd"].ConnectionString;
_conn = new OracleConnection(connString);
_conn.Open(); // EXCEPTION THROWN HERE
Could this be a medium trust issue? The server we're deploying to is also manged by plesk, so there is a virtual guarantee that there is some non-standard setting applied.