Including global.php and banned users

[Mirrorball]

One of the first steps to create a vBulletin-powered script is to include global.php. But when the script is outsite vBulletin directory and the user has been banned, global.php call exit when it is included. A message error is displayed, saying that the user has been banned, but the paths are all wrong. Is there a way to fix the paths or to stop global.php from exiting when it's included?

Doesn't anyone know how to fix this? I thought of buffering the output with ob_start and use register_shutdown_function to register a function that fixes the broken links. But it sounds like too much work. I thought there must be an easier way to accomplish this, or maybe the links were broken because I was doing something wrong...