The UDF to detect office which I think you're speaking about DOES NOT detect any other Office except the Microsoft one. However I'm sure that if they have tagged the registry as most do it can be done, but you will probably have to be the one to write it unless someone else has already done it and is willing to share their code.

If the Windows 9x desktops are not being shared by multiple users I would recommend disabling profiles which would make it easier to deal with them in logon scripts.

All the things you ask should be able to be done, just need to dig in and start doing some searching and testing of code.

I'd recommend you take each task on it's own and perfect the code for it, then plug it into a larger script as you go along.