VNC Robot is really cool - I hope that one day soon the developer provides it as open source! Beyond its obvious value for testing, it really could be used for all sorts of automation.
If you haven't heard of VNC Robot, its a scriptable VNC client, which means you can connect to a remote computer over a network and control its mouse pointer and keyboard input in a programmatic manner. Its pretty amazing technology actually, even basic VNC is good stuff.
A couple of things needed for VNC Robot: