Ooops, I forgot to add that you would need to add another flag and subsequent check: SkipIfArchiveSet=0. It would have to be set to 1 as well in order to not reprocess a file that was already done by another machine, so long as you started with all of them with the flag off.

But the two in conjunction (Skip archive, skip read only) would get the distributed functionality working and without having to write a client/server app.