SPTD.sys (from Daemon Tools) kills my boot (Win XP Media Center Edition)

Background
So I've done a good bit of research on this issue and it appears that some PCs that have Daemon Tools or Alcohol (disk emulators) tend to have problems on booting when your computer loads SPTD.sys. A majority of the problems are reported by users on Media Center Edition (possibly some conflict with a driver that ships on the OS). The issue is that I can't boot up (including in safe mode) without loading that driver. If I go with the prompted safe mode, after loading AGP440.sys it prompts me to hit enter to load SPTD.sys, but whether I hit enter, escape, or wait, it still bluescreens and restarts.
Theory
Since I can't boot up in safe mode, I can't even get to a place where I can just uninstall the thing. I'm guessing my best bet is to dig out my xp CD and boot into the recovery console so that I can axe it. I'm probably going to eventually just start over with Ubuntu on this thing since it's really a productivity laptop, but at this point I'm in recovery mode because I'd like to get everything vital off of it before making any long-term decisions, so please don't give me grief about having a media center PC... I'm well aware of its problems.

Question : Is there a way to remove this driver without booting from a recovery disc? If so, what is the process to do this?

Solution 1:

You might try to boot in Safe mode and press ESC key when you see on bottom line of display:
Press ESC to cancel loading SPTD.sys. This will abort loading of the SPTD layer.

If not, Offline NT Password and Registry editor is said to contain registry-editing tools.
I never tried this tool, but you need to delete the following registry key :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\sptd.

If not, and you can boot into the recovery console, enter the command:

disable sptd

(You can also in that case delete the driver itself.)