You should take one of your spare pcs (when you get one), and just make a DC for that site anyway, and establish a site in AD sites and services. That way you can schedule AD replication, eliminate the question altogether. An added benefit is that you can have your printer shares for that site out there and a DFS share for any apps or files that the two sites share. Your worries about kix are the least of your concerns if your printing and serving apps over a wan link. Kixtart will not cause any noticable bandwidth problems outside of what you already experience.

Also, you can use lmscript emulation to at least eliminate the sending of the executable to the station.