I have AEC installed with its hacks to comprofiler. And the registration is ahppening thru CB1.1

I am unable to validate the email ID now. Is this due to AEC hacks or what? Can I somehow introduce client level email validation in js or something? I need the regular expression validations to work for the email field.

I have checked teh forums and everyone says upgrade to CB1.2 but I am hoping I can find a workaround and some pointers here.