Originally Posted by gmercoleza

I have removed the front coil spring on a W124 without a coil spring compressor, just using a jack. By the time the control arm was almost fully lowered, there was hardly any compression going on at the spring - maybe just 1 or 2 inches. If you lower the control arm very slowly (and from the opposite side of the car as a precaution), you shouldn't run into any problems.

With that said, you shouldn't need to lower the control arm or remove the spring to replace the strut. Just support the control arm at the ball joint as stated earlier.