Running Different Django Versions But Sharing Authentication
It's possible to expose Django 0.96 tables to 1.1 - you can use unmanaged models wrapped around database VIEWs. In other words you issue:
CREATE VIEW auth_user AS SELECT * from django096db.auth_user;
(and similar cmd for other tables)
and then you have Django 1.1 synchronized with 0.96 (assuming 0.96 tables are compatible with 1.1, I haven't checked that).
Brand new to django. We have a legacy django project using django 0.96x that does authentication, ldap, etc., and it's pretty involved so we don't want to rewrite that code.
We want to add a forum solution (off the shelf) but all of the ones I've seen so far require django 1.x 
I'm trying to figure out how to get this working and I've narrowed it down to the following:

Use an old forum solution that works w/django 0.96 (does this exist?)
Try to patch a forum solution to make it "backwards compatible" with 0.96 (possible nightmare)
Use two different djangos: 0.96 and 1.x and (since we're using Apache w/mod_python) have two different Location directives; adjust PYTHONPATH for each appropriately (or use virtualenv, etc.)

But will option #3 even work? I don't know enough about how django.contrib.auth and friends work so if I run two different versions of django will the user stay logged in? I didn't mention trying to patch our 0.96 project to bring it to 1.x but we don't really have the time to do that.
Any suggestions?