I had an issue where I edited the settingsfile in notepad and PS started throwing errors related to not beeing able to read the settings file.
I managed to identify the problem and it was related to encoding. I dont remeber which one but i think it was that notepad changed from or to utf BOM/ w/o BOM. After reverting encoding with notepad++ to the same as the other settings file it worked perfect again.
It might be good if PS either could determine encoding before ingestion or simply retry With/without BOM in case it fails.
Also it would be good if PS recreated the default settings file on startup if it is missing so that you easily could restore defaults by removing the settings file.
//Hannes
Written on mobile, apologies for spelling