Read the "8.2.4.3 The Identity Management User Interface" section of security guide provided with the product. The keys.ini file contains the encryption key of encrypted values. They need to be the same across your landscape. If the UI has one key and the runtimes another then decoding will fail and the string could become '' which is also why I asked you to log the length of the string in the script after decoding.
Br,
Chris
Message was edited by: Per Krabsetsve