Sorry you don't like Novell.. IMHO you should consider yourself lucky. (how often does your server hang, crash or need security patches?!) If you had budget for it, you could run Zenworks. For about $35 per user it will pay for itself in under a year in most cases. (Here the ROI was about 2-1/2 months!) On most planets that will get you promoted. If you're on NW5.x you may already have a subset of Zen 2 (ancient version) which would allow you to run the Snappshot utility and push out the patches as application objects. Check your install media. 4.11 *may* have shipped with that as well but it's been a while!
If you can swing 1 Win2k server, SUS works very nicely and is easier to set up, although it only does patches. You can purch the server lic for <$1000 if you shop around and it will pay for itself in nothing flat. Someone in finance should be able to understand that.
Last, if you have any newer IBM xseries servers they come with a nice chuck of Tivoli software which will do this as well. (although not free)
hope something there helped!