[fian]

Which makes me think there might be utility in always running Windows (or other OSes) in a VM. If the malware assumes VMs are bad and self exit in response, then it should be safer to run everthing in a VM. A side benefit would be you can perform snapshot backups and easily migrate your main environment to new hardware.

[kchr]

You might wanna take a look at Qubes OS, which tries to provide such workflow in a nicely packaged distribution: https://www.qubes-os.org/