In such situations I always end up just asking for permission to run in a VM such as VirtualBox. It incurs a performance hit (often a nasty one) but at least then I can have a configuration with complete admin control that if I screw it up won't screw up the host machine.
As it is I usually have several VM's going at once just so I have things like testing environments for each different OS flavor and 1:1 copies of the servers my code will be deployed to so I'm not screwing around with live copies of anything.
Since "live editing" of codebases is meth-head levels of stupid. Make sure it works in a VM copy of the same environment, THEN deploy!
... so if you're going to need VM's anyways, might as well have a VM dev environment too for all those things they won't let you install native. Gives you a one-stop shop/fix to ask for without their having to give you admin rights on the host OS itself. Do whatever you like in the VM, you screw it up you aren't taking their stuff down with it.