How to deploy common assemblies in large apps

I have a large enterprise application. It involves 50 - 100 seperate .exes and several thousand class library assemblies. We want to group the .exes in their own directories with the .dlls they use. There are about 100 utility assemblies that are commonly used by multiple programs. We would like to keep these in a single directory and let all the other apps use them.

This does not appear to be possible. We can place them in the Global Assembly cache, but they have to be strongly named. If I understand correctly, using strong names will require me to rebuild all the apps that reference them each time we change one of the base assemblies

The ony other alternative seems to be to put a copy of each .dll used by an application in the same directory as the application. This causes us to have many locations to keep synchronized, or keep all the .dlls and .exes in one large directory

Is there a better way?? Am I missing something here

Thanks for any help I receive.