REALLY NEWBIE Question about remote installations

Okay, I manage some computers at an office, about 10 computers....I have a dedicated server but I only am running windows xp sp2 on it and i'm doing the typical sharing drive etc etc for our networking needs.

its really annoying when I need to update a program or do windows updates, or basically anything that needs to be done on all the computers...to do each computer individually. Is there some way that with NT or windows 2003 server that I can make all of this stuff happen remotely? How difficult is it to deploy? I'm not interested in spending a lot of time learning a ton of info just to do this, but it would really help if i could do it.

Basically like if i needed to install a new version of symantec or one of our specialty programs, I want to be able to do it on all the computers really easily rather than going to each one and configuring every single installation blah blah.

thanks in advance for whatever help you can provide for this dumb question.

P.S. I know about connecting to the computers remotely, but I mean it's not that big of a dael for me to walk around to each one or to sit at one and remotely control each one...my point would basically be to be able to have it do things automatically, like i do it once on the server or something and the rest do the same...i figured if anything NT or 2003 would be the program that would allow something of this sort.

OH like a good example is zone alarm, i want to purchase 10 licenses of za for our office but i dont feel like installing them on every computer adn configuring every single computer for the network settings individually, i would want this to be a simpler task...like just doing it ONCE and having the rest be easy Adobe reader is another good example...like if i want to update everyone with version 8, all at once, or like certain IE add-in's I'd like everyone to get...i think you all see where i'm going with this.

Thank you sooo sorry for the length!