How could I?

Bad day yesterday. Bad night last night. Because my computer was locked up and inaccessible to me. I had forgotten my password; my new safe and secure password. But there it was, written carefully three times on a card that I had placed in front of me as I logged on for the first time with the new password. Failed? What went wrong? I keyed it in again. Failure. If I made a mistake when creating the new safe and secure password, I had to make it twice, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to create it. The next half hour was spent trying every permutation of the carefully chosen password and each time I met with failure. I let my wife try her skills at cracking into the computer while I went to the netbook and Google to look up "missing password vista". I found a whole lot of information there, including some things I didn't want to read; 'if you can't break the password code, you will have to re-install Vista and destroy all of your current data and programs'. Sob! There were also a lot of bold ads for pricey password finding programs and I passed on those and went for 5 free programs that were listed on a PC forum. One after the other, CD's were burned with ISO files and the computer rebooted to read the CD drive upon booting. And one after the other they failed. Finally, I went to bed. It was too terrible to contemplate. In the morning I decided to view the $$$ pay per fix programs. I was desperate. I started at the low end and I'm glad I did; I picked the lowest priced one, $13, and went through the whole download, unzip, burn the ISO file onto a CD and then reboot. A GUI screen showed up and I chose to delete the existing password; I really didn't want to know what my mistake had been. Zapping the password would let me open Windows quite easily and that's all I wanted. But now, I'm worried about putting a password back in place…will I make a similar mistake? Well, I will put one back in a few days but it will be a joint effort on our parts. I want a witness!