Visual IRC on a very restricted Vista PC

[swr]

Hi,

I just got my work PC upgraded from Windows XP to Vista. The new setup
is quite a bit more restricted with regards to what I have access to.
The XP allowed me to install Visual IRC (which I, of course, consider
a very useful and close to business-critical application! ;-) but I am
not sure our company management would agree with me!), but when
installing on Vista, it requires an administrator login, which I
unfortunately don't have.

Anyway, I am looking for a way to "install" the application "manually"
in another location. I first copied the ViRC directory from another
PC, corrected .ini files, exported/imported the registry entries and
corrected those, and tried to start it up.

Immediately, it would complain about vcl50.bpl missing. I found it and
copied it into the ViRC directory, and did the same with vclx50.bpl,
when it complained about that one, too.

Now, when I try to launch the application, it crashes and reports a
kernel32.dll error.

My tricky question: Are there anybody out there, who have tried this
and found a way to get ViRC up and running on a PC, where you neither
have the administrator password nor write access to the Windows,
System32 or Program Files directories?

FYI, it reports this in the application event log:
Faulting application ViRC.exe, version 2.0.0.187, time stamp
0x2a425e19, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time
stamp 0x4791a76d, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x000bf285,
process id 0xcc8, application start time 0x01c90470c70a8b95.

I assume, it tries to access a restricted memory area.

I know, I could just find another IRC client, but I like ViRC too much
to not try to make it work.

Any help to make this essential and productivity enhancing application
work is greatly appreciated. :-)

/Stig

P.S. I did try to bribe our desktop system administrators for the
local administrator password, but either the price was not high enough
or maybe they are just a bunch of chickens! ;-)