It shouldn't be a problem, ted. Then again, it shouldn't hurt to try it out for yourself, the most time you'll be spending from upload to finishing setup is roughly 2 minutes, give or take depending on your connection speed and how fast you type :D
I'm testing it out on mediatemple.net, which runs everything in safe mode. It's working fine. But some extensions won't (like the avatar uploader resizer one, as it needs some file-level access that safe mode doesn't allow).