Thank you for the great suggestions, LLigetfa and MikeT. I will definitely have to check out ADSI via the adsi25.chm help file.
And MikeT, thanks for the tip in using SUBSTR. Possibly I could use this to grab only the first letter of the full name, right? Then I could put the 2 values together to form the firstinitial+lastname convention I want.
The purpose of this is to be able to automatically rename a few hundred 9x workstations instead of having to walk around personally. Of course, it will require a reboot to take effect, but that's not a problem.