Yes, you can manually start the player software without a playlist loaded. But that requires the developer image and a shell prompt anyway, and I think a fast finger on ctrl-C if I'm not mistaken. It's easier just to do the upgrade if that works. And if you don't have 1.03 developer you'd need to do an upgrade to install developer anyway.

So, when you upgrade to 2.0beta11 make sure it's the developer flavor just in case it doesn't work and you still need to get to the shell prompt.