C# - Any Reference To Profilecommon Causes Error Value Cannot Be Null. Parameter Name: Type?

I have searched for two weeks, every night, exhaustively reading forum threads and trying all suggested solutions no matter how outlandish. Just as is the case with the many many forum threads about this same issue, the site works fine on my development machine. It deploys with no errors. It works from the production server and reads data from the database, but when it attempts to access a profile it crashes with this error.

A number of posts say to check or uncheck an option called "remove app_code.compiled file" but apparently this was a Visual Studio 2005 option. It is nowhere to be found in Visual Studio 2010. A number of posts say to make sure the App_Code.dll is present in my bin directory. It is present. I've deleted the app_code.compile file manually to see if that made any difference. I've changed the target framework from 4.0 to 2.0 and 3.5. I've completely deleted the site in IIS, created a different folder with a different name and redeployed the site with every combination of "allow this precompiled site to be updatable" and "Use fixed naming and single page assemblies".

i've included references to System.Web.Profile and System.Web and System.Web.Profile.ProfileCommon. I've created a new, fresh website targeting .net framework v4.0 and copied that web.config file to my application and recreated my profile entries to ensure that I didn't jack anything up in the config file along the way.