Doesn't it seem that everyone is avoiding the "elephant in the room" here? Virus scanners are a severe drain on productivity. Perhaps I'm in the minority by running a Windows box, but when I open up Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645) it sickens me to see how much I/O is going toward stupid virus scanning operations. Not to mention the 500MB of real memory that the various scanner binaries are consuming. My virus scanner consumes more memory and I/O than my IDE (Visual Studio 2010).

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I would expect that a developer should know enough about computing to not get a virus. This, of course is assuming the organization has a competent IT department and is "securing the perimeter" with firewalls/proxies, and only allows approved software loaded on machines.

Sure, this would be a radical approach to IT, but I think it's a policy that needs to be implemented.