Hi James,
Some ideas:
1. Internet Toolkit from NI - as far as I remember, Telnet is included
2. Using TCP functions (and some documentation about Telnet protocol) you can implement it.
3. Use a Telnet application and try to send "commands" to it (there are available some VIs to communicate with other apps this way, especially for windows)
4. Try to implement a little server application (on your remote machine, capable of triggering those processes) and connect to it using TCP. You can find an example in Labview.
If one of these sounds interesting, I'll be happy to give you details.