Sidetracked

I have finally finished painting the trim on the four windows in the front parlor.  Finally.  No more standing in the oven.  Just one more big window (with no stained glass panes, so no teeny muntins!) to paint, and a second coat of paint on the baseboard, and then I can put up wallpaper in the front parlor.

What's that you said?  Oh, you thought I said I was going to finish the other parlor first?  Wellllll, I did say that.  But I got sidetracked.  And this time, it wasn't my short attention span or my tendency to bang around the house like a pinball that sidetracked me.  It was something worse.  Now listen up, because I don't say these words very often: 

I can't do it by myself.

Ack!  It pains me to say that.  I absolutely, positively hate admitting that I need help.  Even worse, I hate asking for help.  This time, though, I'm going to have to.  See, before I can finish painting the trim in there, I need to remove the hardware from two transom windows and from the clothes press.  The clothes press has eight hinges, four cabinet latches, and two (or maybe three) ornate hooks.  Of course, every bit of this hardware has paint glommed all over it.  The screws aren't even visible on the transom hardware.  I've tried the old trick of putting the screwdriver in the slot and then whacking it with a hammer, I've tried using stripper to get the paint off the screws, but no matter what I try, I just can't get a good enough bite on the screw to remove it.  I shouldn't feel bad about this, I guess, because I remember Mare having a lot of trouble getting the hinges off the doors when we restored that hardware.  (Now that I think about it, I seem to remember nagging asking him to take the rest of the hardware off the doors and windows...)

So, until I can get someone over here to help me, I can't finish the other parlor.  Unless one of you fine people reading this has another idea for how to remove painted-over hardware...Know it?  Spill it in the comments.  Please and thank you!