>Under windows XP, when I right click and choose properties on certain types of files I can see a whole list of things I'd like to get may hands on. I'd like to pull in the author, title, subject, comments - stuff like that. Can anyone give me a starting point or set me off in the right direction?

You can use DsoFile ActiveX DLL which is available at
http://download.microsoft.com/download/office97dev/Utility/2/WIN98/EN-US/Dsofile.exe
The description is in KB article Q224351.