Great, that's running now.  Thanks Revalin!

So when it's gone through them all I'll either get a "success: your password is: dontbeanidiot" or "no luck"?

EDIT: I still get "Incorrect RPC user/pass" even when starting bitcoind as "bitcoind -rpcpassword=rpc-pass".  I renamed bitcoin.conf to bitcoin.conf.old like you said (in linux)

I've got it running on my windows machine, but it won't run in my ubuntu VM properly.  I want to run it in the VM as it may take a while, and I can save the state of the VM and safely reboot my computer without losing the progress.