I don't see a good solution. It seems your predecessors wanted tight control, but didn't implement things properly to actually do it. Your production boxes should be boringly identical. Best solution is to present a case to managment that the production boxes need to be wiped and rebuilt from a single box using disk mirroring (assuming the hardware is the same--if not, you're in even worse).

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated