The 'at' is an excellent suggestion. It will mean though I will have to write a VBScript or WScript program to emulate a browser hitting the secure server (and I'm not even sure they can initiate HTTPS connections). I'll start looking in to that. It's a great idea. I also agree with you that depending on a webpage is crazy. It's unfortunately a sign of my desperation.
Comment on Re: Re: Scheduling tasks the _hard_ way
I'm sure VB can load a web page, but Perl can too. You could install perl on that office machine and use LWP to do the HTTPS request. It may be harder to get SSL working that way though, than to simply use the VB stuff (which I think runs the IE code to do it).