Help with furniture renovation

[ElephantsChild]

I have an old chest of drawers that I want to bring back to life. It has three drawers: one has two good handles, the other two drawers have one good / one bad. I want to take off the damaged handles to discard them and move one of the good handles on to the same drawer as the other.
But ... they are stuck! They are a bit like this i.e a swinging handle attached to a backplate which is screwed onto the drawer.
It is the screws that are the problem. They are old, slotted and made of some soft metal that starts to strip if I apply too much pressure. I put some WD40 on overnight but that hasn't seemed to help much.
Any ideas on how to unscrew without doing anything too drastic to the screws and drawer because I want to rescrew?

are the screws on the front of the handles, or the back (inside the drawer)? Is there a nut or anything on the inside?

How old and worn are your screwdrivers, and how near are they to the exact size of the screwhead? I expect the screws are brass, and will be tarnished, but will show gold where you have damaged them.

WD40 will not help with screws in wood.

Do you know anyone with a soldering iron?

Screws are on the front, they do not go all the way through the wood..

The screwdrivers are a problem. The one with a fine enough tip is not wide enough for torque. The one that is wide enough for torque is too fat to fit in the slot.

I have tried scraping at the slot - they are v shallow - to made it more pronounced and the metal is silver-coloured. The screwheads are 3/8".

I haven't got a soldering iron. What help would it be?

the tip of a hot iron touched on a screw-head makes the metal temporarily expand, so it will be looser in the wood when it cools down after a minute, and loosens the grip of the wood.

Look out for some new screwdrivers with sharply-ground hardened tips. Sets are often good value, in DIY shops and even in supermarkets. It is very important to use the correct size. Good tools are made of chrome-vanadium steel, which is a hard and strong alloy. The tips do not need to be chrome-plated. "steel" or "hardened steel" or "chromed" are inferior.