The winged nut on both my struts (original) wasn't torqued very much at all. The real booger was the nut above the mounting/retaining plate (the one you can see at the top of the strut with the hood open. The 4-bladed/winged strut nut was simple to remove (carefully)once the upper nut was off with a set of channel-lock pliers and some barrier material to prevent damage. A c-spanner or special tool probably have been a bit better. I could almost have removed these by hand if I'd had some sort of protection for my fingers, certainly didn't seem anywhere near 51lbs. I simply used the pliers to re-torque as tightly as possible.

As far a locktite, there was none used in the original assembly, although I did consider using it for my reassembly. Wouldn't use the heavy-duty stuff. Light or medium would suffice. Really, if you look at the way the strut is assembled, that thing wouldn't depart the car unless you had a dramatic failure of the actual strut mount/bearing assembly, even if it was intentionally under-torqued. I think the high torque specs may be partially responsible for some of the early failure reports, in fact. The "core," for lack of a better term, of the spring seat is easily squished by the torquing of the winged nut, which could be the cause of it's loosing integrity and bond with the surrounding seat rubber and consequently causing looseness and knocking.

Clearly, I am no engineer or even a mechanic, but it's a theory...
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I luv me bricks!