Q: Is there a way to get the IDE to write the gamside.ini file to another directory than the default one?

There are some notes about this in the on-line help of the GAMSIDE. In the section Installation Notes:

If the My Documents directory is not suitable to store the gamside.ini file, a new location can be specified as a parameter when executing gamside.exe. The file name gamside.ini is required to be recognized as the initialization file. A new directory can be specified when creating a windows shortcut to the executable.

For example when the executable is located in the directory

\\server\gams

and the initialization is located in c:\Local Users, the target in shortcut can be specified as:

\\server\gams\gamside.exe "c:\Local Users\gamside.ini"