Out of curiosity, do any of them use the Autodesk subscription services? Vigil had switched to it and was quite happy, though it seems Adobe's setup is a bit different.

The Autodesk subscriptions reduced the IT staff workload, and also ensured the artists could access the newer versions of 3DS Max easily. Having the latest seemed to be a big goal of both the art and programming tools teams. Inside THQ, there was a lot of tools and code sharing where it made sense, and newer projects would tend to just start on the latest 3DS Max or similar software.