SSO Secret unavailable

Recently we had to restore an environment for a demo. This environment consists of a couple of servers, the main one (obviously) being a BizTalk 2009 server. Here we ran into this error in the SSO console application:

ERROR: Cannot perform encryption or decryption because the secret is not available from the master secret server.

My first attempt was to restore the secret from an old back-up file as described on MSDN: How to Restore the Master Secret. There you have to enter the password you used when configuring SSO and alas we couldn't retrieve that password.

Basically this means you're up the creek. I could find only one solution to this:
1. Export your bindings, and make notes of the host instances you use;
2. In BizTalk Server Configuration unconfigure Enterprise SSO (which will automatically unconfigure most of the other features);
3. In SQL Server Management Studio delete SSODB and the BizTalk databases (deleting just the SSODB and re-using the BizTalk databases won't work);
4. In BizTalk Server Configuration reconfigure all features from scratch (and this time make sure you have a way to retrieve the SSO Secret backup password!);
5. Recreate the host instances using the exact same names as before (they are hardcoded in the bindings file);
6. Redeploy your application(s);
7. Import your bindings.

If done correctly, you'll have this done in an hour or less. Which sure beats the time I had to spend on this...