I only wish I had such privelages on this box... And I wish we were using Apache instead of Websphere!
Thanks for the suggestions, anyhow. I already decided on a course of action similar to #2. Since this CGI was already making a socket connection to another server to check on some process statuses, I decided to just run a second socket connection to a script running on mptsuser on 127.0.0.1 so that mptsuser can launch whatever the CGI tells it to. Maybe not the best solution, but the only one (so far) that doesn't make me dependant on somebody else doing what I want (or increasing my permissions) in a timely fashion this close to the holidays...