Make your WordPress plugins use a different version of a bundled JavaScript library

I've recently coded my first WordPress plugin, for the fun of it. I've been using WordPress for some time, and I know PHP quite well, so I figured it'd be fun. WordPress has a weird/interesting way of being extendable. I won't go into too much technical details about that, but suffices to say that it's easy yet complicated to perform tasks you want to. Yeah, that weird.

All that being said, I upgraded my WordPress from 2.7 to 2.7.1 in the middle of coding some new features for the latest release of WP-prettyphoto, 1.1. That made me realize that updating WordPress' core also updates the installed JavaScript modules, namely jQuery (among many others). When I first coded WP-prettyphoto, when things weren't working I just replaced the jQuery I had with the latest official stable release and things worked fine. I didn't give it much thought. So when I updated WordPress, all hell broke loose and WP-prettyphoto was metaphorically crying in agony because jQuery wasn't man enough for it. I then tried performing the same manual updating procedure, and without really surprising anyone -- I was alone anyway -- WP-prettyphoto was back prettyfying my stuff like a starving fat kid eats a cheesecake.