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You can just load the pointcloud_to_laserscan nodelet in a nodelet manager and leave out all other nodelets. Have a look here for more information on nodelets. To launch a single nodelet in a standalone node, you can use:

<launch>
  <node pkg="nodelet" type="nodelet" name="point_cloud_to_laser_manager" output="screen" args="standalone pointcloud_to_laserscan/CloudToScan">
    <param name="output_frame_id" value="/camera_depth_frame"/>
    <!-- heights are in the (optical?) frame of the kinect -->
    <param name="min_height" value="-0.025"/>
    <param name="max_height" value="0.025"/>
    <remap from="cloud" to="/cloud_throttled"/>
    <remap from="scan" to="/narrow_scan"/>
  </node>
</launch>

I just copied the relevant parts from kinect.launch and put them in a standalone nodelet. Note that the nodelet listens on /cloud_throttled, i.e. you either must record that topic, remap your point cloud topic to it in rosbag play or change the remapping in the above launch file.