<p>Does anyone know of a powershell cmdlet out there for automating task scheduler in XP/2003?  If you've ever tried to work w/ schtasks you know it's pretty painful.</p>

You don't need PowerShell to automate the Task Scheduler, you can use the SCHTASKS command in XP.
According to
Wikipedia
, the Task Scheduler 2.0 (Vista and Server 2008) is accesible via COM.