Been a while but I thought there was a way to update the PATH without directly editing the registry. I will have to do some research over the weekend.
Maybe you were thinking of setx from the command line?
You can update the machine environment variables with setx. Will update HKLM instead of HKCU when using the /m switch.
Sue
Actually I seem to remember a GUI interface for doing this. Of course the last time I had to worry about this I was working with NT 4.0.