[c#] There is an error in XML document (1, 41)

Agreed with the answer from sll, but experienced another hurdle which was having specified a namespace in the attributes, when receiving the return xml that namespace wasn't included and thus failed finding the class.

i had to find a workaround to specifying the namespace in the attribute and it worked.

ie.

[Serializable()]
    [XmlRoot("Patient", Namespace = "http://www.xxxx.org/TargetNamespace")]
    public class Patient

generated

<Patient xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.xxxx.org/TargetNamespace">

but I had to change it to

[Serializable()]
[XmlRoot("Patient")]
public class Patient

which generated to

<Patient xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

This solved my problem, hope it helps someone else.