Avast won't delete infected files

Checked if this had been posted before, but couldn’t find anything quickly enough ;). Home edition, latest version. The program finds an infected file and gives the choice to move it, delete it (and some other options). When I try to do anything to the file, avast says it can’t. Attached the resulting popup. Not really a problem, can delete manually, but thought you might like to know.

Err tried to attach the popup, doesn’t seem to work.
It says something like:

‘The process can’t access the file’
‘Cannot process ’

hmmm, odd. Anyone have ideas on whats going on? But maybe I can help, what file is infected and by what virus?

Maybe it was a file “in use” by the OS. Does Avast allow scanning in Safe Mode? If it does you may wanna try that next time.

I’ve seen this problems many, many times. And it had always the same cause: avast! itself had this file “in use” (locked). The file could be found in the user’s temp file directory.

You can try to delete all your temporary files. If you can not delete all these files, because they are currently locked (in use, for example by avast!), log on as Administrator and remove them (this should always work).

Let us know if this worked for you.

I’ve got a netsky-p infected file in one of my internet mail accounts that I can play with. If I place it on the desktop and scan for viruses, avast finds it but can’t remove it, like I described (but I can remove it myself manually). One thing I hadn’t considered is that it is a zip file. If I extract the file from the zipfile, avast finds it when scanning and removes it without a problem. I think drahnier is right about files in the temp directory: to look into the archive, I think avast makes winzip extract the infested file to the temp directory. And that’s probably where something goes wrong with the file locking.
Anyway, a big thank you to all who replied :slight_smile:

You are correct about the zip files (I forgot to mention that).