>This is interesting. If it were you then, would you implement the automatic retrieval of the user's machine information hitting the Intranet web page thru some use of DCOM, XMLHTTP, etc. with some specialized object located on each workstation instead of thru the web page itself?

If this is what you need to do, maybe that's the only way to accomplish the task. FWIW, you might want to check out WMI which allows you to control, configure and administer machine resources very easily even across the network.

There have been a series of articles in the MSDN magazine recently.