Joe,
Thanks for the advice. I'm still finding my way in the world of scripting and intending to use ME as a kind of "wrapper" for the various useful scripts and utilities I find. For example, I sometimes need to convert some JPEGs into PDFs, add a document control sheet and have a single PDF as output with the control sheet (originally Excel) as the first sheet.
To do this, I print the Excel to a pdf using a pdf printer. I use ImageMagick via the command prompt to convert and combine the JPEGs with tight control over compression, resolution and so on. I then use the pdftk toolkit via the command line to combine the various pdfs as I want them. (see http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php and http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/ ) ME seems the best way to tie all this together with consistent naming conventions and directory structures. The HTA approach you cited looks like a good candidate for "wrapping" imagemagick since I never use any of these command line tools often enough to remember usage parameters. Time for me to study your examples further.
Robert