I recently spilled some water on my MacBook (mid-2010) keyboard and it shorted out several of the keys. Notably, control and left option don't work, and the system thinks that the left shift is permanently held down.

I plugged in an external USB keyboard and all keys work fine; there's only one problem:

The computer always starts in safe mode because the shift key is held down.

I've tried holding down other keys (escape, space, c to name a few) and the control key doesn't work so I can't try that. I also tried KeyRemap4Macbook but it doesn't work in safe mode and it doesn't seem to help on startup for me.

I can log in to Windows with no problems (with rEFIt) and I can browse the internet with no problems, but I can't program on the Mac OS side in safe mode (it's really slow). Which is mainly what I use this Macbook for.

Any ideas out there on how to avoid starting in safe mode?