When adding web front end to existing farm psconfig fails with expression must evalute to a node-set

We are attempting to add a second wfe to our SharePoint 2010 farm. The configuration wizard fails on step 3 with the error: "Failed to connect to the configuration database. An exception of type System.Xml.XPath.XPathException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Expression must evaluate to a node-set."

The same version of SP is installed on both wfe.

We have tested the ability to connect to the database with a test udl. It is successful.

We have used the farm admin account and the account that was used to install SP originally. Both fail.

We have run psconfig from the command line and it also fails with the same message.

SQL 2008, SP 2010 (14.0.7015.1000)