Got handed a code base that had been slapped together by an offshore dev shop. It was a spaghetti combo of c, php, and Java. The configuration data was located inside a compiled c binary provided to us by the dev shop. If we wanted to make a config change we had to ask them to do it and send us a new binary. Kind of awkward since they had been fired due to slipped deadlines and horribly buggy code (insert shocked face here). We scrapped the whole thing eventually. I'm still blown away by how bad it was. Never seen anything like it before or since.