autorun.inf FOLDER on each partition that cannot be opened/deleted

I’m using Win7 64-bit and running avast FREE.

I have folders called “autorun.inf” on the root of every partition.

It cannot be opened or deleted and I can’t change the attributes, even from the command line with admin privileges:
I enter “attrib -rhs c:\autorun.inf”, and computer says “Access denied”.

I scan with Avast and Malwarebytes and nothing is detected.

Should I be worried? Are these folders created by anti-virus/anti-malware programs to PREVENT infection by the autorun.inf virus?

Symptoms:

I seem to have strange pauses when accessing drives sometimes, though maybe they just go to sleep to save power.

Drive labels are not displayed for certain HDDs. When I right-click Computer > Manage > Disk Management, all the partitions are named correctly, but in Explorer, they just shows ‘Local Disk’ or ‘Removable Drive’ instead. The labels are blank in the Properties dialog. (If by chance you know how to fix this, please let me know!)

Thanks for reading!

Hi have you ever used any programme to immunise (as they call it) the autorun function ?

Download McShield to your desktop and install
It will initially run a scan and show the result as a toaster by the system clock
Then in the control centre select scanner and tick unhide items on flash drives

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/73555776/mcshield%20unhide.JPG

Plug in the drive and McShield will start a scan

Then get the log which will be here :

Start > all programs > MCShield > logs > all scans

And post that

Thanks for your quick reply essexboy!

I might have without knowing it. In addition to always having avast! free and malwarebytes, I also use Argente Utilities.
It might have created the autorun.inf folders as part of its one-click maintenance.

It will initially run a scan and show the result as a toaster by the system clock

I didn’t see a toaster. I did see a spinning shield.

Then in the control centre select scanner and tick [b]unhide items on flash drives[/b]

Plug in the drive and McShield will start a scan

Then get the log which will be here :

Start > all programs > MCShield > logs > all scans

And post that

See attachment.

It says it’s all clean. The reason I wanted to delete the autorun.inf folders is that they seem to prevent explorer.exe from displaying drive labels correctly. (“Local Disk” instead of the proper name visible in Computer Management, CMD.EXE and McShield) But if they are necessary to protect from virus, it would be more important than having friendly drive names. I mostly use libraries and shortcuts to access the content of those drives, anyway.

If the system is behaving then I would leave them, if they were malicious then McShield would have raised a warning