I am so glad I do not do Civil work, its seems like you guys go through hell constantly.
While it's true some people seem to have a lot of trouble with C3D, I can say that I have very few problems with it. Why that is, I really don't know...although I think a lot of it is that I don't have to deal with an IT dept. It seems like 90% of the real weird issues I've seen reported are with people whose hands are tied by IT.
Mark, not sure what else to say, other than your IT dept has got you using a brand new release of C3D (which always has issues until the first service pack) on a 12 year old OS. Just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.