[eluser]Sean Murphy[/eluser]
adamp1, MyISAM does not support transactions. Switching to InnoDB would be much safer than any hack to get psudo-transactional support for MyISAM.
Whether InnoDB is faster than MyISAM depends on the individual case. There are a lot of things to take into consideration.
Have you benchmarked switching your table to InnoDB? How big of a performance hit is it? Have you looked at what you could optimize to get your performance back?