A friend has forgotten the WP admin password and for reasons, the e-mail recovery option did not work. It is possible to setup a new password by using phpMyAdmin. Under the "Users" table, locate the user and use MD5 option to setup a password. There had been some discussions that WP no longer uses MD5 but apparently MD5 encryption works OK.
About hardware / software / mobile experience. Hope to save somebody's time one day. This site is ad-free. No nag screen on ad-blocker :-) Please leave a comment if you find the posts useful - or post a comment for update and new info.