Get the installed version of IE - if you are in to that sort of thing:

Using Tim Golden's extra cool WMI, secret sauce Pywin32, and batteries included _winreg:
Of course, you wan't to be a privilaged user for remote query of WMI.

import _winreg
import wmi

# let us assume you name your computers with numbers :-) say 1-23
machinelist = range(11,23)
for machine in machinelist:
  machinename = 'HOSTNUM-' + str(machine)
  print machinename
  try:
    r = wmi.Registry(computer=machinename)
    result, ieversion = r.GetStringValue(hDefKey = _winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
      sSubKeyName=r"Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer",
      sValueName="Version"
    )
    print ieversion
  # Hey, if this machine is sleeping, leave it alone :-)
  # See the Python Wake on Lan if you want to do more 
  # and wake them up - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/awake
  except:
    # this thing is not on
    pass