Sorry to hear that your company is downgrading its OS to something
with less than spectacular performance.  You might want to 
log the problems ( with times ) that NT has with some sort
of monitoring script.  Nothing like providing paperwork to
managers that shows exactly what the problems were and how
long they took to resolve.  You could also do a cost analysis
on the data...afterall, downtime is money!

At least you get to use Perl...the O'Reilly book entitled
Perl for System Administration should be able to help with
this.

--moo