Your first suggestion would be completely against our corporate policy, and there would be no way that I could do that without getting fired. I was able to get it working by getting a copy of the patterns.ini file.
With this hack of a solution, I won't get continual block list updates. I was hoping that there could be a feature request for ABP-IE to support proxies in the future.
At home I use ABP on Chrome and it works just great.
