-snip- but in a nutshell the first challenge was to manually reconstruct the damaged wallet json to be valid.
OP did mentioned that he opened it as text as he said that he can read the contents
And he once edited the "
use_encryption" value to "
false", he may have damaged something in the process.
Okay, so the question now is whether OP really forgot his correct password or (
very unlikely) his Electrum wallet's password has changed after an update as he originally claimed.
I'll let his answer this one.