Questions[password-recovery](server)

As IT Support, my team is taking so much time reseting passwords. So, we thought it would be interesting to enable some sort of Password Challenge in Active Directory so users could reset their own passwords, after correctly answering some questions.

Despite we alert users by mail when their passwords are going to expire, they just delete the mail and go on so we think it should be a great idea.

I've seen some commercial products but I'm not sure if there is something built-in or GPL to enable this kind of feature.

Could someone shed some light about it?

I can't get the password from the AWS console tools. I can reach the box via rdesktop.Can I reset the password remotely? If so, how to go about doing this? the machine is Windows server 2008 R2 Datacenter.

Is it possible to reset the password on a SuperMicro IPMI interface? My motherboard is model X8STI-F.

The web seems to be flooded by password removers. I'm however on the other side. I'm interested in security of my files.

If I have a WinRAR archive (> 1 Mbyte) and use a password (> 6 characters length with non-alphanumeric characters), how secure my archive will be?

Does anyone know of a free open source recovery tool? Should include recovery of document protection password ideally.

EDIT: I'll settle for just Free instead of free and open source :) I'm looking for something that will handle not only passwords used to open the file but also passwords used to do Word's different forms of document protection.