Place order without using any shipping module

I am setting up a site for an antiques/fine art dealer. Every product he sells is a one-off, many are unusual shapes (which attract premium shipping prices, so pricing per weight won't work) & he insists on being able to enter & edit the shipping prices for various services to specified countries manually.

I have done this by making shipping prices product attributes - the customer selects his country & shipping method on the product page, in the same way as they might select a colour for a T-shirt (1st attempt here).

When I tried to test-buy an item, ZC would not let me complete checkout until I installed at least one shipping module so I installed the 'Free Shipping' module. When I bought a badger everything worked.

My problem is that, although I am charging shipping, when I check out the free shipping module tells the customer that their only option is... free shipping. All I can think of is to edit the free shipping module dialogue box so that it says something like "do you want to continue?"**

Is there any way of getting through checkout without installing a shipping module**?

Thanks for your attention
Rgds
Mike