Since the portable versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported (and never fully worked) I\'m trying to find a way to test sites in a number of different browsers.<
Have you tried Adobe BrowserLab?
But for functional testing I'm afraid you will have to do it in browsers. If you are using Linux, you can have a Windows XP installation with (Internet Explorer 8, Safari, and Chrome) on VirtualBox on a Linux machine (Internet Explorer 8 has an option to behave like Internet Explorer 7). And do Internet Explorer 6 testing on Wine in Linux. Checkout PlayOnLinux for running Internet Explorer 6 on Linux.