Changing Buttons/text *PIC*

I’m writing my first AppleScript app- The basics of what I want it to do work, but the eye candy etc. need to be finished.
It’s an application to control the cli version of Folding@Home in the GUI.
Currently- upon startup, it detects wether or not folding is installed (according to where it wants it installed) and offers to install it if its not- and the buttons to stop and start folding work.
A screenshot is here: http://macaddict4life.dhs.org/fold_images/fold_control.jpg
I need to know how to dynamically manipulate the buttons and text. For example, I want the stop folding button to not be selectable if it is already stopped, and available if it is running.
I want the start button to not be available if it is running, and to be not only available but respong to the return key (blue throbbing) if folding is stopped.
The 1 or 2 cpu- I want that to be greyed out (as it is in the picture) on one cpu machines, and available on dual machines- with the box checked or unchecked dependant upon what the user has chosen.
I know how to detect all that indepent- but what I don’t know how to do is take what I detected and change the widget settings accordingly.
The way I think to do it is to have a function that does all the checks and sets the variables etc. and then sets the buttons.
Then when a button is pressed, it could do what the button is suppose to do and then call the function to redo all the settigs.
The status bars I need to do with a second function and runn it in a loop so they update every 10 minutes (I doubt even the 1 GHz cpu’s will do a percent in 10 minutes so real time monitoring of the progress would be a waste of cpu- I’ll just monitor the logfile every 10 minutes and reset the status bar to whatever percentage is done)
Anyway- I hope what I need to do is clearly conveyed. I’ve tried lots of things and I can’t seem to get the buttons etc. to be anything other than what I tell them to be in the Interface Builder.
Thanks for any suggestions.