[mothered]

I have VMs running as a Guest OS on a couple of "dedicated (Host) systems" segregated from the network, for the purpose of downloading and executing files.

There are no account logins, nor any sensitive activity performed- solely for testing purposes. If deemed safe, the files are transferred (using dedicated clean USB sticks) to It's respective PC. VMs are not fail-safe so If malicious content escapes the virtual environment, no big deal, there's no critical data on the physical machines. A clean Installation of Windows and an hour later, I'm up and running.

Also, backups are kept of all VHDs (In their original state) so If they're Infected, It only takes a couple of minutes to mount the VHD on the VM. Snapshots have failed me at the best of times, so I no longer waste my time with that.