I've often wondered myself how to quickly make mass changes to all my site
collections, such as changing the image, theme, portal site  url, etc, without
coding. I'm not a coder, so have never gotten very far, and end up going through
all my 40+ site collections  one by one and making the changes.

Re your question: have you thought of creating a central search  center and
pointing all your site collections to it instead of having to customize each
site collection's search? You'll need MOSS not WSS to do that, using the "Search
Center" or "Search Center with tabs" templates under the Enterprise tab in the
template selector.

We are running MOSS Standard, and we have deployed search  center. The only
solution I've come across is to create a custom master page, put like you I
am not a coder. I did find one promising lead here:
stsadm.blogspot.com/.../...h-scopes-and-rules.html but when I
run the command it does set the target site  collections search drop down
correctly, but causes all the other site collections  to revert
to their default settings  for the search drop down.

Does SharePoint 2010 make this task easier?