If you only want certain validators to fire on a large ASP.NET page (for example) then you can set the EnableClientScript property to false and use server side validation only in that case. Generally you are doing different validation based on a different control causing the postback.  So, on the server side you can check only the IsValid property for the validators that were supposed to be checked when that control caused the postback (i.e. a certain button was clicked so the Click event fired).

I thought it was a nice and simple workaround anyway. =)