Perlib Registry Corruptions And MSDE

I support many uncontrolled MSDE installs on Win98 machines who are moving to XP. Unfortunately, many of the machine owners are choosing to upgrade their machines to XP, rather than choosing to re-roll.

The problem with this is that the edition of MSDE 2 (SP2) that I'm supporting not only gets it's registry items for the services ripped out, but the perflib registry itself becomes truncated by the MS Windows upgrade. So, no services and the thing can't be uninstalled due to performance monitor rollback issues...

Refer you all to MS KB Article 300956 and the fix for the broken registry which includes expanding system files that contain the default perflib entries referenced by registry. I ran through this process and found that it worked. I was then able to install a named instance of MSDE and remove the broken copy, followed by the instance. From here an install of MSDE went on fine. So what am I posting for?

Adding performance counters into the perflib/009 registry key during the install (which is a condition of my MSDE install and can't be changed) is all well and good, but what about other applications requiring performance counters? Since they have been replaced by the system default performance monitors what kinds of other services, apps or anything may be adversly affected? Not really a db question but directly linked to being able to support MSDE...
Is there anyone out there who's had to utilise this fix before and are there any repercussions that are considered unnaceptable in terms of losing machine functionality???

Basically I need to know if taking performance counters back to the stock system settings is not all that horrible a thing to do to XP client machines, especially as the perflib keys are so corrupted anyway.

ANY THOUGHTS???

(other than formatting and starting again of course!)