Thanks for the replies; of the proposed solutions the telnet server 
seems to be the most straightforward (provided there is an easily 
accessible telnet server working under win98). While it's true the gues 
OS is already running VNC, so it could be controlled through it and some 
scripting program, but this seems a bit elaborate to me. Rsh also seems 
to be a nice option, however I know less about it than of telnet.

I have to add, I was hoping some tool similar to the windows native 
command line utilities which accept a host name, like shutdown -m 
\\servername. Don't clients for such protocols exist on unix/NetBSD?

thx
mortee