TechFly,
Let me give you a somewhat unconventional answer - use a web page. You can use IIS and whatever CGI available on the box (Actionscript, Asp, PHP, Perl, etc). Create a simple web form that when submitted tells the windows box what to do. The form can then render a page with the results that the remote process can parse for feedback.

This may seem like a lot more work than is necessary and depending on your "powers that be" may not be acceptable. On the other hand, by divorcing the direct interaction you create the ability to be implementation agnostic.

This same concept could be done in a myriad of ways. For instance, if both hosts shared a file system (Samba, NFS, etc) then you could communicate by placing files in the directory and having processes on each end monitor for.