The virus cleaner sometimes replaced an infected template with a clean one. Because the templates carry the formatting information, the cleaning would sometimes set the formats back a change cycle. When you're dealing with hundreds of files approaching final production, randomly losing a set of formatting changes was unbearable. The team decided to turn off the continuous scanning, even though it meant running in an infected mode. It wasn't until the viruses ran unchecked that the nasty ones reared their ugly heads.
Most macro viruses are cosmetic.
But when they encountered a virus that randomly turned the file save function off the could no longer ignore the viruses. Here's what we set up to get through the final production weekend. First we copied the entire proposal down to two separate computers and disconnected them from the network. One was scanned and cleaned, the other was left infected. These two machines were back-ups, with much faster reaction time then tape backups.