Caught in encrypted backup ****--is iCloud a way out?

Hi all,

I've been tearing my hair out over this for the last 24 hours: like many people (a search of the forums reveals), the backups from my my iPhone 5 are now encrypted and I don't ever remember setting a password. I've tried every variation of every password I've ever used for anything, went through a dictionary attack on the backup file, and used a program to attempt numbers 0 through 999999. None of them worked--and if I had set the password myself it would have just been the same password that I use for everything else Apple.

I don't care too much about having access to old backups, although that would be nice, but it is absolutely infuriating that information I can see on the iPhone screen in plaintext right now (I don't even have a numerical login on the home screen!) can now not be backed up ever. This is a feature??! Encrypting the backup encrypts the whole darn phone? If I have physical possession of the thing and can scroll through all the messages anyway, why prevent me from downloading it?

Anyway, what I mostly care about saving off the phone that can't be accessed another way is the text messages, iMessages, etc. I can see my contacts list is backed up in iCloud and I know the apps can all just be reinstalled.

So: the iCloud backup. Is that a way out of this mess so that I can start to backup my phone again without losing everything? I did an iCloud backup which is supposed to, as I understand it, back up all the SMS messages and so on even though they aren't visible when one logs in on iCloud.com. Is that still the case even if the iTunes backup file is encrypted? As I understand it, the iCloud backup is encrypted by Apple on their end, not using the iTunes backup password that I apparently either set to gibberish without realizing or somehow appeared out of thin air. Or is the iCloud backup going to be missing the text messages because they were encrypted by iTunes?

Alternatively, does anyone else know another more hack-y approach to getting around this? I have a Windows 7 box so the Apple-only trick of going in the computer's keychain won't work.