This application requires one of the following versions of .NET Framework

In case someone else encounters this, I had a similar problem with a windows service that wouldn't start due to an allegedly missing version 4.6 of the .NET framework. In my case, due to copy and paste, the following had happened in the config file:

<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework, Version = v4.6"/>

whereas the following works:

<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.6"/>

So, the spaces are the culprit and must not be there! Why I don't know, because you'd expect the parser to be a little less picky, but ok...

We recently came across a similar problem. When starting a service, we received the error "This application requires one of the following versions of .NET Framework:"

We discovered the issue was our misunderstanding of how to update the app.config file.

We had changed the app.config file to set <supportedRuntime version="v4.7" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.7" />

But should have set it to <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.7" />

We had incorrectly set the major version of .NET as explained in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/configure-apps/file-schema/startup/supportedruntime-element#version