Frequent random software crashes taking out files, applications and OS

We are a small niche publishing company with a network of 9 Macs of various ages - some very new running 10.6.3 and others older (mini macs running 10.5). We run MS Office (2004,2008 and 2011), Extensis Suitcase (Fusion) and QuarkXpress v8.
About 6 months ago one of the Mac users (running OS 10.5) complained that his Microsoft User Data folder had moved. I moved it back but everything then went downhill from then on. One by one all the Macs became corrupted in some way, and they nearly always followed the same pattern. Firstly files or folders on the desktop go missing (not in trash) then Extensis Suitcase and QuarkXpress become corrupted. Quite often Word or Entourage fails too. On many occasions the OS has also become corrupted so I have to reinstall everything.
This now happens on a daily basis, although 2 or 3 of the Macs seem to have settled down and have not played up for some weeks. As you can imagine we have wasted a tremendous amount of time and energy on this. We employed the services of an IT specialist who cannot work out what the problem is. He thought it was a file-sharing problem and installed a Mac Server but it has made no difference.
Someone in an online IT forum suggested that if we have a Quark document that keeps getting over-written (which is the case with us) then it has probably become corrupted and it corrupts whatever is stored near it on the hard drive, so could quite easily take down applications and the OS. This seemed logical and I asked the department to build new pages from scratch and banned them from opening the old pages. This has made no difference.
QuarkXpress themselves said that Quark can crash if you edit and save a document which was created in an earlier version of Quark. Well, Quark crashes all the time and seems to be the worst piece of software ever written in my opinion, but it shouldn't wipe out your whole computer, should it??
I had also suspected a virus and put Kaspersky on a couple of the most-used Macs for a while but it didn't find anything so I didn't bother reinstalling it again when I next had to do a re-install of the Macs.
I am now suspecting it could be something to do with MS Office 2004. I have some older Mac Minis which should be running it fine (but don't) but it has also been loaded on a few of the more modern iMacs running 10.6. I notice the two Macs running 10.6 which have "settled down" and haven't played up for weeks run Office 2008 and 2011.
I am also posting this problem to Microsoft and Quark in the hope that someone somewhere has experienced this before and can come up with a solution.

The theories that best fit your description are (1) sabotage and (2) defective third-party software.
As for (1), check your logs carefully for evidence of unauthorized access, either remote or local.
As for (2), look for anything you installed on all the affected hosts that runs as root or includes a kernel extension. Commercial "anti-virus" software would be a prime suspect.
Verify the directory of the startup volume of each client in Disk Utility (you can do this via a remote shell with diskutil.)
+QuarkXpress themselves said that Quark can crash if you edit and save a document which was created in an earlier version of Quark. Well, Quark crashes all the time and seems to be the worst piece of software ever written in my opinion, but it shouldn't wipe out your whole computer, should it?+
No, it shouldn't and it can't.

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Last edited by lolilolicon (2013-07-10 04:48:20)

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