A personal confrontation between Sauron and the new ringlord is what I have been talking about the whole time. In the battle between Sauron and the ringlord the armies would engage and play tremendous havoc with each other. In the confusion, Sauron would storm up to the pretender and personally settle matters with them.
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I am fairly convinced that there was a time during the third age when Sauron could have been defeated even by a non-ringlord
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I suppose it depends on what you mean by defeated. He was driven from Dol Guldur twice, although he retreated willingly both times. If you mean obliterated, that wasn’t possible without either the destruction or mastery of the Ring, which wasn’t in any way possible until ca. 2463. However, for practical purposes it wasn’t possible until 2941, the year Sauron left Dol Guldur permanently. He returned to Mordor the next year. Ignoring all the problems of getting the Ring to one of the other “potential” candidates for Ring-mastery (as I have no problem with the picture of Gandalf being able to overthrow and replace Sauron) lets just say for the sake of argument that this other contender gets the Ring in 2942, the same year Sauron returned in secret to Mordor (obviously Aragorn is out of this particular picture). At that moment Sauron has not begun rebuilding Barad-dur and Dol Guldur lies empty. Militarily speaking the new Ringlord could command the forces of Gondor, Rohan, Lorien, the Woodland Realm, Dale, Laketown, whatever Woodmen happened to be sitting around with nothing else to do, and the Longbeards (Isengard and Dunland if Saruman is the new Ringlord, although Saruman had not at this point, it would seem, taken an army into his service yet). Assuming the new Ringlord knew where to find Sauron (which is conceivable) the Ringlord would probably have wanted to head to Mordor to put down the ultimate threat once and for all. It would probably have taken a few years to pull all of this together, with probably at least a year to put the army together. During this time Sauron would undoubtedly know what had happened. He too would spend the time assembling his forces and probably quickly establish himself in Mordor. At this point he would still undoubtedly have a large army of orcs to call upon as well as the military forces of multiple eastern and southern peoples. We still ultimately end up with a battle and a situation from which I don’t think anybody but Gandalf could have emerged victorious.
As an aside, one begins to wonder where Sauron kept his orcs during his period of exile. He apparently had some sort of dwelling in eastern Middle-earth, which is probably a likely candidate. Truly, eastern Middle-earth must have had some interesting tales to tell about itself.