IMO, if it's just a matter of an "Ugly Menu", keep in mind that a corporate wallet has no eyes and doesn't care if it's ugly. It works perfectly and gets the job done. Cosmetics will seldom improve the bottom line in a situation like that.   

Good points, but the system has to be revamped, as it will not work properly in the new enviroment with Explorer.exe as the shell (throws error on every app launch). The guy who supported this menu has retired, and there is no Winbatch support here except for me and that is one big convoluted script. I have been directed to replace this with something similar in apperance that we can use for this and other uses.........and besides, its a tobacco company, we got fat wallets (or at least our lawyers do). I was hoping to utilize a few other features into this, some basic system info, a little clock, maybe like a secret key combo that will present a password prompt, if you have the password then you can unlock a command prompt to allow you to run various programs with elevated rights as needed. I could take it even further, and tie an rss feed to read off the latest headlines from our sharepoint site and any approved news sites. Basically if I have to learn a new scripting method I would prefer DX over Winbatch.

So, from the feedback it sounds like you guys don't think this product would be well suited to do any serious work with...

Not trying to start or continue a flame war, but I asked for ideals on scripting, not on preparing my business case for a particular piece of software. I am evaluating many options in completing this request. I have toyed around with DX for sometime and have really enjoyed the functionality of some of the gadgets the community has produced (and was very impressed with the support of the community). I thought it would be nice if I could leverage this to improve the experience for the end users and provide added functionality. If the product will work, I can make a successful business case for it.

My boss saw some of the stuff I was playing with and asked if it could be used to revamp our antiquated menu system. I was just curious if anyone had made or attempted to make a dynamic shortcut menu based off of a network config file. My boss is rather dimwitted and is easily impressed with shiny things, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to give him something both shiny and functional.

As for the Pro's and Con's listed earlier:
Pro's for current System
1 - Current Menu does not work in Windows XP sp2
2 - Keep new menu similar enough so no training is required.
3 - Support Retired - I'm a Winbatch Novice
Con's against DX
1 - New Cost - if it works as advertised, not an issue.
2 - New technology support - beats old technology support.
3 - Training - Both Winbatch and DX would pretty much have to be self taught by looking at others examples

Pro's for DX
1 - Is really shiny.
2 - Can provide more information than just a square box with six little boxes to start processes.
3 - All the stuff on the DesktopX Enterprise webpage - easy and powerful to create kiosk, secure corporate desktop, etc.
4 - Supports corporate standard scripting methods. VB is in, Winbatch is out.
5 - Is really shiny.
6 - "Great" community support.
7 - Corp Version does not require proprietary dll's to be preinstalled for standalone exe's to run.
8 - Did I mention its really shiny.

Anyway thanks for the replies, I've got a working mock up running, it's just not looking at the network file to get the program list, everything is hardcoded.

You're most likely going to have to use WMI for this. It appears to be more functional in regards to network scripting but, their's lot's of resources out there in various programming forums. Haven't done any scripting in that area myself but, have seen many examples out there.

Is it as powerful as Winbatch? I can't say as I haven't really used it but, I'm thinking it's just a friendly face to writing batch files, etc than what is natively available. On that point alone DesktopX is equally as powerful & more so because you have the GUI abilities.

Obviously you could even do it within WSH (vbscript,jscript, etc) and you could adjust the font's used within the corresponding input/message boxes. I'm thinking this would actually take a little more time to implement than using desktopX.

The other pro is that the average production worker's age is usually skewed towards closer to retirement so, have the ability to adjust size/colours is also a big plus from an ergonomic perspective.

Just some thoughts. Check out Tek Tips VBScript forums maybe there are some examples for you.