OpenVPN: "There already exist a config file named..."

peter_b · Post by **peter_b** » Thu Mar 02, 2017 9:38 pm

[PROBLEM]
Running OpenVPN as client on Windows 7, I ran into the following error message:

There already exist a config file named '%s'. You cannot have multiple config files with the same name, even if they reside in diffrent folders.

The problem occurred, because the same .ovpn config file was once imported - and then copied to OpenVPN's config folder ("C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config").

[SOLUTION]
On Windows 7, OpenVPN stores the configuration in 2 places:

Global: C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config
Per-user: C:\Users\[YOUR_USERNAME]\OpenVPN\config

If you import configs using the "Import file..." option, they are copied to the "Users" configuration.
Simply delete the configuration file(s) ending in ".ovpn" either of these folders, depending if you want to keep the global or per-user configuration.