I have an odd situation and am looking for some guidance that may save me an absolutely mindblowing amount of work.

I have a bitcoin wallet which has stored a ton of addresses. Many customers and clients pay to their own address, and there is an automated system that wathces those payments and acts on them.

The flash drive that contained the passphrase has been, lets just say it's been irrevocably damaged. (which may or may not have involved our asshole dog). I have it being looked at by a friend who knows about data recovery and electronics, so maybe irrevocable isnt the best term, but, my hopes are not high.

So here's the special circumstance. We lost the passphrase. However, the wallet right now IS OPEN AND UNLOCKED.

Question one: Before we have a power issue or my machine decides to reboot, is it possible to extract the passphrase from memory? It has to be in there somewhere to keep it open. Anyone know how and where to look and with what tool? I used to have a tool back in my video gaming days that would scan the memory of your PC and look for data (42,528gp) and then you change that data (spend some gp) and have it search for the new value. Once it found it, it could edit the data in memory and suddenly you have 999,999gp.

Is anything like that possible with bitcoin?

Second question, not sure if this is harder or easier: We also have a backup of the original wallet BEFORE we added the encryption key. Only a few addresses are in it - so we cant use that (we'd lose over 200 customer private keys). But given we have a wallet with a UNENCRYPTED private key, and the same exact key that IS encrypted, could there be a tool that knowing the before and after, could more easily brute force/figure out the passphrase?

Now before the replies with other alternatives come in, we've already considered them. We cannot just send the balance out to a new address - it's the loss of the current private keys. Issuing each customer a new address and updating all records and the database will be a massive pain in the ass.

Someone else suggested a better option: Export all the private keys, and then re-import them into a new wallet. A better option than above, as we retain all addresses, but it's still a huge amount of work to do by hand (or to hire someone to write the scripts to do it).

That is the option we will go with if we have no other choice. The biggest reason I'm asking here instead of just getting right in on exporting the keys is that we used that passphrase on our LTC wallet also, which is NOT open. The balance in there is not huge - about 81 LTC or so, which is just about 1.2 BTC or so - we could live with losing that, but obviously would rather not, if we could possibly recover the current key.

Is something like this feasiable? Any insight or help would be appreceiated. Thanks in advance.