Thanks Paul. I greatly appreciate your help. I would imagine that building Emacs with a more modern gcc compiler could potentially make Emacs run slightly faster, although the benefits may be marginal if at all noticeable, correct? Feature-wise, I am probably not missing much if anything I guess.
Either way, and just to confirm, I presume that if I download and build glibc and gcc in a local folder I could eventually compile and run Emacs with a more recent version of gcc/glibc. This would be a long term project for me, but if you have any pointers on how to put something like this together without admin privileges that would be great.
Other than that, I am all set. Thanks again for your all help,
James