Ask HN: How intrusive is your company's security policy?

I'm trying to get a sense of the wider world's IT practices with respect to what kinds of virus software and trackers need to be installed to participate on the company/campus network. I'll give my personal background on this in a minute (and you can comment on that too), but I'm actually curious to hear about particular practices elsewhere as much as comment on my own situation. At my location, they have been rolling out a two-part "solution" over the course of this year: first, a virus scanner, and second, a compliance agent that regularly reports in on what system software your machine is running and whether you are running their virus software and a few other assorted system details, and if they don't check out, you get booted off the network. For instance, shortly after a recent Windows Update was published, a wide swath of the campus was knocked off the network because their system was no longer up to date. This seemed more or less reasonable for the machines they controlled directly and somewhat annoying when it meant I couldn't use my laptop here anymore (the install failed on the first try, then blocked me from the network, and prevented me from downloading the needed updates without going home first, so I gave up because it wasn't very critical, just a little inconvenient). Most recently, they've declared that we will have to install these scanners on our home machines if we want to connect using VPN. This goes beyond just inconvenient; I work from home with some regularity, they block ssh except from VPNed machines, and I really don't want their scanners reporting in to them about my own personal machines. (Responses to my complaints have in the past been limited to variants on "We need to do this. For security.") Now, I've visited many places that granted access to their network---not just cafés but college campuses, hotels, etc---and they did not require me to download and install invasive scanning software just for the privilege of internet access; my sense of IT practices is that this is really being overzealous. But I figured I'd pose the question to the metabrain and get schooled in case I'm wrong. :)