SQL 2008 R2, Standard Edition, Way to give higher priority to a user (or a query)?

SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition 64-bit running on Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit.

When we went from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008 we have some queries that no longer perform as well as they did in 2000.

We plan in the future to rewrite the program and optimze the queries in them.  We don't have the resources to do that at this time. 

We are on "Standard Edition" of SQL server so we do not have the Resource Governor to use.

Is there any way on Standard Edition we can boost the prioity of a Login?  If not, is there a way to boost it for an individual query?  (Actually a set of queries - we would need to repeat it for each one.)

Thanks

Murf