"Error reading settings file" error is reported when settings.xml is deleted from maven/conf folder.

I have deleted the settings.xml file in the maven/conf folder. This should be perfectly legal as Maven runs ok without this file. But an attempt to use any maven-ant-task results in the following (or similar) error message:

[artifact:pom] Error reading settings file 'c:\apache-maven-2.1.0\conf\settings.xml' - ignoring20:46
or was: c:\apache-maven-2.1.0\conf\settings.xml (The system cannot find the file specified)

Everything works ok, but this error message is confusing.