HttpWebRequest support for named pipes?

Question

To all the .NET experts, I have a question for you.

I need to do SOAP/HTTP over named pipes on Windows, in C#. (This is for a client talking to a Python library/server using SOAP for RPC. Using socket/port was deemed both insecure, and port configuration becomes a hassle.) There are two problems.

1. There is an HttpWebRequest class, but it only supports http URI’s. I can’t find any easy way to change it to support named pipes. Any ideas?
   In theory, I could subclass WebRequest, but I don't want to have to rewrite all of the HTTP protocol in C# just to get named pipe support.

2. There is a PipeStream class, but it is only supported on .NET 3.5 and above. My stuff has to work with .NET 2.0….

I tried searching on google and on this site. There are very few hits (actually, no relevant ones) for HttpWebRequest in combination with named pipes (though each topic by itself has lots of hits).

Any advice is appreciated, thanks.