Forcing an application to load assemblies from a specific path

I have a *third-party* .NET application that fails when executed in Windows 
7 (so far I have only tried with the beta, although I expect it to be the 
same with the RC). I have already determined the cause. The application uses 
reflection to retrieve information for a method in one of the types in the 
framework. In Windows 7, this type was changed to add an overload for this 
particular method and as a result, the call to Type.GetMethod now fails with 
"Ambiguous match found.". (Remember that this is not my application so I 
can't change the fact that it calls the GetMethod overload that takes a 
single string parameter with the method's name.)

I will ignore for the moment the fact that we appear to be back in DLL hell 
considering that assemblies in Windows 7 maintain the same version number 
even though they have breaking changes. To resolve the problem, I want to 
configure the application to load the System.dll assembly from .NET 3.5 SP1 
instead.

My first approach was to set up a DEVPATH to a private folder where I copied 
the correct assembly from another machine and I was able to confirm that the 
application is able to execute successfully using this version of 
System.dll.

However, to use DEVPATH you must configure it at the machine.config level 
and it has an impact on every .NET application in the system. Instead, I 
want to configure just this application so that it loads its own private 
System.dll. I tried with <assemblyBinding> and a <codeBase> pointing to a 
private folder, but this seems to be ignored.

So the question is, how can I force the application to load System.dll from 
a specific path?

Thanks,
Fernando 

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