Thank you very much for the response.  I was panicking and probably posted in the wrong forum.

I've used btcrecover before and found it excellent for taking a list of password fragments including positional information and trying them.  It also has good support for spelling errors and a resume file etc.

While I understand that BIP0038 is resistant to such, one decryption attempt takes approx 10 seconds on the hardware I could dedicate. A couple of million variations could be attempted in less than a year.

Given that John the Ripper doesn't support BIP0038, I guess it's time to fire up crunch, learn some Go, and set up some a scripts as best I can.  Unless anyone has any better suggestions.

Thanks, everyone.

EDIT:  Thanks for the time-travelling idea.  I used the same old hardware and software versions, and everything worked as expected, so no luck there.

Good day.  I've been involved in Bitcoin for a while now.  Am using a throwaway to avoid embarrassment.

Last year, I moved my cold storage coins to paper wallets made by Bitaddress.org.  Used a laptop with Linux Mint 17 boot key and the offline version from Github.

I tried to recover a couple of coins from a wallet in order to pay some medical bills (only valid reason right now) and can't get these things unlocked.  The balance is still in the address but I keep getting told I have an invalid passphrase for this encrypted wallet.

My main wallets have longer passphrases with special characters, but I've just tried a smaller one that had a simple password, and I can't unlock these either.

Unlike wallet.dat which has btcrecover (an excellent tool), I can't find any good BIP0038 cracking tools - the GoCoin dependent efforts I'm using are leaving me chasing dependency circles and everything else I saw is too primitive.

Any suggestions?  I'm too poor right now to offer a significant reward, but can offer a few dollars if anyone makes it work.

Could the boot ISO have defaulted to an older character set or something weird like that?