Working on Win2000 at distance

RealVNC is my choice (www.realvnc.com/download.html)
It's free, faily secure and can be made very secure using tunneling
It can be used with various systems (Windows & Linux)
If you're mobile you can have the client on a floppy and quickly get access to your system from anywhere with an Internet connection without having to install software.

Is it 2000 Server?  If it is, you can run it in terminal server mode and allow administrators to connect to the machine remotely.  If it's not server, realVNC is your best option, like Tezdread mentioned.

Well, if you want better speed, security and reliability, combined with ease of use, spend $35 and getr a licsence for remote administrator:

http://www.famatech.com/

I have used just about all of them I'd say, PCAnywhere, Timbuktu, VNC, remote administrator, vpn's, and a few cheap web based(browser-based) buggy, in-secure remote access tools, remote administrator is the best of all of them in my humble opinion, and famatech keeps the costs very cheap.

Cheers,

jatcan

If you are an administrator, then you can look at the hard drive without the need for any tools.  Just map a drive or navigate a UNC path to it and do whatever you want.  As for the rest of what you want, you can get a huge amount of information about a remote computer via scripting and the use of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).  VNC is a wonderful tool and I use it a lot myself.  But, it does open you up to certain risks.  IMHO things like VNC are meant for taks that cannot be performed, or cannot easily be performed except when being on the remote computer.  I use VNC to provide remote support to staff.  When they have a problem I can connect to their computer and see exactly what they're doing.  That's not something I could do by just mapping a drive or using a script and WMI.  But, if I want to know what processes are running on a remote computer, then I run a script to collect that information.  It's much faster and less intrusive than starting VNC, connecting to the remote machine, and drilling through however many screens necessary to find that out.

Here's a link to a tool called Scriptomatic.  It gererates canned scripts that'll retrieve an unbelievable amount of information about a computer.  It will work against both the local and remote computers.  If nothing else it's a great learning tool.  To retrieve infrormation about a remote computer you do have to have administrative rights on the remote computer.  

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/tools/wmimatic.mspx

there's a review of some packages here:
http://www.scmagazine.com/products/index.cfm?fuseaction=GroupTestDetails&GroupId=6304

but I also like Dameware
www.dameware.com
lots of remote management - ie disk space checks, start stop services, etc.  Plus remote control!

Hyena's good too, but doesn't have the RC.
http://www.systemtools.com/hyena/

for details on what processes are running the Win2k supports tools gives you it all and the ability to kill apps...not sure if this works via telnet though?? Has anyone tried?

RealVNC looks good although I will need more time to investigate.  Had a look at WMI scripting in more detail but as far as I could tell this only provides me with information about the computer.  Basically, the PC's we have run on Windows 2000 Professional, not Windows 2000 Server and belong to our customers who are not all that computer literate.  What we would really like to do is to sort out their problems without having to send an engineer to site.  It is a shame we don't use Windows XP because this has a Remote Assistance tool which would be perfect for what we need.  As for the other comments posted, I am working through them in turn but thank you all in advance.

WMI provides much more than just information about the computer, if by "computer" you mean the hardware.  You can list the process that are running, service settings, information about the account currently logged in, read the event logs, really an incredible amount of information.  And it doesn't require Windows 2000 Server.  I'm not trying to sell you on WMI and I'm not saying anything bad about VNC, which I use too.  I just want to dispell any misconceptions about what WMI is and what it can do.  

I think I phrased my last comment wrong.  I have seen that WMI provides info on software issues like user accounts and processes, but could I, for example, perform operations on the PC such as move or delete files.