UPDATE:
This was at least two seperate issues. I finally made some progress by moving the application to another drive. I actually uninstalled and and reinstalled to the same drive/directory first; words cannot describe how angry SOE's patcher makes me. The end result of THAT was the same exact situation... had to run as administrator, and custom UIs were completely ignored.
When I gave that up, I simply re-copied all the files from my girlfriend's machine again, though fior some reason I copied them to my D:/ drive this time. I then installed the UI files, revisited and tweaked the NTFS permissions, and it suddenly worked. Not only did the interfaces start working, but my previous crippled install would always re-download files (about 15 minutes worth) every time I played. Now it immediately plays (assuming no patch).
I said above that it was two seperate issues because, even though the files are being recognized now, I am still being forced to run this as Administrator, even though my normal account is in the Administrator's group. So those two issues appear to be unrelated.
My assumption is that there was some sort of disk corruption on my C:\ drive that the patcher was SO sensitive to that it failed to work. Honestly, for a collection of software as profitable as SOE's stable of games, I'm surprised that their patcher is as brittle as it is. But whatever, it is working now, and it was apparently hardware related somehow.
I wanted to post the end result since everyone has been so helpful here. Thanks again for all the suggestions.
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