I'm using a product called WinBatch from Wilson Windowware to automate PDF manipulation, similar to your Visual Basic strategy. With WinBatch, you can build a script to handle all the manual keystrokes, pop up windows for capturing variable values, and put the whole process on the clock. We generate PDFs from a variety of programs and they are combined in Acrobat Exchange, bookmarked and optimized by the WinBatch script. In the end, the script invokes an FTP tool to transfer the finished product from the desktop to an intranet web server. The scripts can be modular (callable with passed paramters). This tool has saved me counless hours of manual PDF preparation. Microsoft has a similar scripting language, but I haven't used it.