Did you try uninstalling any apps that might have been causing safe mode in the first place, or did you just go right to respring/reboot/restore? Not sure why you wouldn't want to figure out what was causing it...
Nothing jailbreak related was available to me while i was in safe mode. It was as if i was not jail broken. So i had no way of doing it. Now what caused it is an app from Cydia called notifier widget which also installed status notifier. After that it was in safe mode. Then i was unable to restore and got stuck at the connect to iTunes screen. Ended up running green poison and rejailbreaking and that got me up and running
In case it happens again, you can usually still open Cydia in safe mode, and uninstall packages that are causing problems--you just can't run the apps themselves.