I came back to a project that I had not built for some time, and received the following error:

The Publisher attribute of the Identity element in the app manifest must 
have the value of the Publisher ID value from your developer account:
{my dev account id}.

The help link associated with the error in Visual Studio was not helpful. I won’t post it here because no one should follow it, and it should not get any hits and increase its popularity by search engines.

OK, so how do you solve this issue? Don’t try to regenerate the certificate yourself from the App Manifest Designer.

Instead, *re-associate* your app with the Windows Store
and you will get an updated pfx file with the correct info.

This issue seems complicated further by the combining of stores for Windows and Windows Phone apps, because now my certificate as a GUID for a common name instead of the Publisher ID which would be a human readable string.

Live and learn…