Most of the Boost libraries (such as Boost.Random) are header libraries, which means that you add ${BOOST} to the include path of your compiler and you're done with the "installation". There are a few Boost libraries (Python, Regex, Signals, Test, and Thread) that produce actual .lib library files. If you are not using those libraries, you do not need to build the .lib files.
Other libraries that produce .libs are the date_time library and in the upcoming 1.30 release the filesystem library. There are a group of boosters working on the install process, but in the meantime I see no reason why you can't do something simple like create a /bin directory and copy/move/link the libraries to this location so you don't have to traverse deep into the directory tree to find them. Jeff