1: I encrypted the wallet on a live ubuntu CD. Is there any difference in encoding?
2: Is there any faster way to check the key, besides submitting a message to bitcoind? I am currently doing about 3-4 guesses per second which isn't cutting it so far

I have what I thought was the key, but so far no luck. If the key is somehow in a different encoding, then I don't want to be grabbing at sand, but I also don't want to sit around for 10 years. Wondering what some alternatives are.