R – Place to store user settings in Sharepoint besides profiles

Is user profiles an appropriate place to store things like number of items per page in a custom grid user selected? (I you can store it in the view, but it won't be per user this way).

My first though was to store these settings in user profiles, but there are problems with access permissions for programmatically creating user profile properties boiling down to you either have to give every user 'Manager User Profiles' permission in SSP or you have to run the application pool under a domain user, not NETWORK SERVICE. Both scenarios are unrealistic for me, so I'm now looking for another way to store such 'per user' settings.

Thanks!

Edit: I'm now considering ASP.NET profile mechanism with an additional DB to store user properties.