Thunder Connection Problems

We are trying to get thunder working in our environment and having difficulty.  We have a website that has it's authentication through ADFS.  When trying to set up thunder, we are unable to log in, so we tried creating local accounts, but the local accounts apparently need to be authenticated first according to the reply by Marin Atanasov on this post - www.sitefinity.com/.../test-connection-failed-

In order to change the membership provider tab, one must connect to the site.  We are unable to connect to the site to set this to our LDAP provider, as we've disabled the regular Sitefinity login.  How can we modify the membership provider selection so I can set it to my LDAP provider and we can log in to Thunder with that?

Thanks