I had a hardware failure and had to migrate machines.  Booting from the old drive was not an option, but I recovered data including all VMs.  However, I discovered to my horror that my Win11 VMs now prompt me for a password, claiming to be encrypted.

Destructively removing the vTPM as described in the article or this thread isn't an option.  I need to know: where was the password stored on the old machine?!?!?

It's hard to speak politely, as binding a virtual machine to its host like this is such a phenomenally bad design choice.  The WHOLE POINT of software emulation (i.e. managedvm.autoAddVTPM = “software”) is to ABSTRACT the host away, not lock it in.  If I wanted actual VM encryption or security, I would've asked for that.  I didn't.