How unsafe is it to change the data source of repl_distributor on a publisher

Question

I have a long story that I will condense to a few bullet points that leads up to my question

• Reporting Server (SQL 2008) is distributor/subscriber cluster for a SQL 2000 Transactional Publication
• Reporting Server was migrated to new SAN
• Reporting Server fatally crashed upon completion of migration (model db was corrupted)
• I installed another instance of SQL on a node of the cluster, attached dbs, and changed report connections to use this new instance
• Stupidly, I attached the [distribution] database to this new instance
• select * from sysservers (rightly) returns that the distributor is still the first instance on the cluster.

My question is this. How terribly would it break things if I ran the following on the publisher (or is this even possible):

sp_configure ‘allow updates’, 1
 GO
 RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
 GO

update sysservers set datasource = 'server\instance' where srvname = 'repl_distributor';
GO

sp_configure ‘allow updates’, 0
 GO
 RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
 GO

EDIT:

Is this even the best way, or is there an alternative way to change the distributor?