Personally, the cleanest way I've been able to accomplish changing this in regard to OSPF, logging and authentication on Cisco's is to suck down the running config, make the changes in your editor of choice, push it back up to startup-config and schedule a reboot. iBGP is much easier to make the changes as you outline.
this is my fear. which is why i asked. pushing out new configs (the canonic config is on disk, not the router [0]) and setting a reload of a bunch of routers at time t0 does not give me warm fuzzies about what the world will be like at time tn (n > 0). but i may have to take that path. i am hoping folk will give me a magic pill. after all, any group with such a deep understanding of how to deal with the world's social ills must know a bit of router magic <smirk>. randy --- [0] - i once worked at a large company who was proud of saying that "the network is the database of record." i left there rather quickly.