Removing a counter from multiple devices

I've never had to do this before, and am slightly nervous to experiment based on the number of devices in our system. We have a counter that stopped working on all of our monitored servers. I've found that removing the counter and then re-adding what appears to be the same thing makes it function correctly. Unfortunately, the counter is defined on several hundred devices, many of which have been customized beyond the device template that they are associated with. The counter in question was defined in this template.

Is it possible to somehow delete the performance counter from the template and get it to remove it from all associated servers without also removing any customizations to the counter setups that exist on each server? If not, is this somehow possible with a database script? I'd hate to try something and have it delete all of the customizations we've performed. We can always restore from backups, but I'd rather not have to go through that if I can help it.