How can you allow a Standard user change the ip address in Vista Home?

I am preparing a new laptop for use by an end user. The laptop has Windows Vista Home Basic installed. I need to allow the end user, who will be utilizing a "Standard" account, to change the IP properties on the network adapters. Most of our other laptops have Vista Business on them... on those laptops I normally allow this behavior with a group policy. I have found that Vista Home editions do not support group policies. After doing some research, it appeared that I could grant the appropriate permissions by adding the user to the "Network Configuration Operators" group. There is no proper users & groups applet in Vista Home, so I found the "net localgroup" command, which should allow you to add a user to a group via the cmd line. However, I am getting an error that this group does not exist. After doing some more digging, I have found others who report that this group no longer exists in Vista SP1. So my question is: How can I grant a Standard user the permissions to control network adapter properties in Vista Home Basic? Our policy is that laptop users not have admin permissions, which has cut down drastically in the amount of time spent cleaning up these things after use. However, I need users to be able to alter IP address and other network setting to accommodate the many different network configurations they encounter.