Shorted laptop key and boot loop

I’ll spare everyone the trouble shooting steps here, but in a preliminary nutshell I took on two older HP laptops - let’s call them Charcoal and Gold - with Charcoal having a keyboard issue that persisted into other connected keyboards. Gold on the other hand boot loops installation media.

Charcoal has a shorted left control key. Keyboard assembly is plastic riveted into the faceplate. Is there any way to kill the key on a hardware level without Power Tools so it’s not shorted on login before PT can load and disable it?

Gold has dashes of blue (Windows logo?) corruption before a squished loading circle appears for a few seconds, hard-faults (freezes), and boot loops. I had suspected and can only currently blame the iGPU as being faulty now, but the TIM and surface of the die looked fine. HP BIOS utility memory tester and MemTest86 both work fine and pass. Options?

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