Tough. Any solution that requires a refresh will need some $ investment - be it an actual designer or a 3rd party viewer.
And the issue is not just OS patches. Other things to consider:
CR 9 does not support any of the "modern" Operating Systems (e.g.; WIN 8, Win 7, Win 2012). And as you presumably update your databases CR 9 will eventually not be able to report off of those. E.g.; say the report was using some version of MS SQL, you update that to MS SQL 2012, more than likely, the report will stop working.
Possibly the better question is why the powers that be are so terrified of updating. I suspect we could help and the help on these forums is free. And there is tons of documentation on how to, what to, etc., etc.
- Ludek