Invalid XML provides a misleading error message

[SpliceVW]

If your config XML contains invalid XML (in my case, my passwords had unescaped ampersands, but I was able to reproduce with other XML errors), you receive an error SharePoint version (year) was not specified in..., instead of a more helpful message like "Unable to parse the XML".

[tomgron]

I totally got this too - good catch, thanks for the heads up