Yeah, it's dead easy to program from an initial patch:
sine wave, unison at about 3 or 4, fiddle about with the semitones on the oscillators a bit and for clean bass use hardly any detune and no reverb. Bit of Sub Osc to fatten it up too. Take the cutoff up or down a bit according to taste. I always tend to use a LP filter for these sounds. Make sure your patch isn't panning wide so it cuts straight down the middle.
I think most of the preset patches are intended to show off the Virus's capabilities and modulation options as I've found the really usable stuff when proganmming it myself and keeping things simple. When I hear Virus presets in tunes - e.g. Howard Scarr's patch "weee" on a Rennaissance CD, they are used as one-shots on breakdowns and intros. No wonder you hear some people saying "I can't use the presets in my songs". It's because they're not being subtle enough with their Virus and trying to use some mad patch all throughout their song.
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