Wow, there are a few different techniques that everyone uses by the sounds of it. And for the most part, all would be more effective than the current situation. The only big challange proposted for the most part is that the user's account would need to be logged in as the specific user for at the time for and VNC/Remote Assistance.
I will be taking some of the information for other tasks, such as the "I may change your password, if I do it will be ...". It will work for some of my clients. I don't really feel the security is kept free from a 'hands on hardware' situation unless the users lock their phone with a code though. I do see the benefit for easing the interruption to the user.
I was having a think about dumping the hashes remotely over the network or from the user's terminal and essentially trying to decrypt their password with Rainbow Tables. This won't obviously work in some situations (due to the limitations of dumping hashes), but I believe I could write a simple remote script to echo back the dump to the server for decryption. This poses a number of questions and possible security risks, but I believe it might work for what I am trying to achieve...
Anyone got any thoughts? I probably won't have time to get back on here for a couple of days, so I might just have a read of anything posted, before starting out.
Thanks for all the sweet tasty info so far..