To tell you the truth I was worried that you will write such an answer...

1) Do not use cron for such purposes. You might set a task in cron (task that would execute every minute)... But this is not the purpose of cron. Use it to execute some periodic scripts like cleanup that is performed once a day.
Of course you can use cron like you do - but there are many reasons why you shouldn't... I'll give you only one here:
Checking your mail manually every hour by going to the post office is a bad idea - instead there is a postman that would bring it to you when a new mail is present.
In the software world: you should not execute this code every minute. You should use some event based mechanism instead.

2) Different boxes => you cannot(*) execute an application on the remote host
(*) - in fact you can but you shouldn't

3) I would suggest a simple application (JAVA, C#, whatever) that is running as a service (get a service template from the web) and is listening on some network port. When your *.vbs, *.exe, *.whatever should be started - you just send a notification to the windows box (which acts as a server).
Example solution (probably not the best but simple one):
Some web server with server-side scripts support (like python... or php... or perl). The script is executing the .vbs file. You don't need bat file in that case.
According to my tiny humble experience you will use perl scripts or something similar (personally I do not like perl because it is way too easy to make the code unmaintainable).