I recently downloaded Avast! on my laptop and will be soon doing it on my laptop. I scan has detected these two viruses:
Win32: Trojan-gen. {VC} in C:\x.cab and the same virus listed a second time again in the same file. The first file was orginally called VM.exe and the second VMInstaller.exe.
Are these false hits? I’ve seen other people pulling this up as well.
Hello 
If you have files which you think are false detected (false positives) you can try to upload them to virustotal.com or virusscan.jotti.org to see if only avast! detects them, if only avast! detects them as a virus it’s probably a false positive. In case the files are false positives for sure, you can send them to virus[at]avast[dot]com in password protected archive ( usually the password is “virus” ) and as a mail subject write “False Positive” 
While you are waiting for the false positives to be fixed you can add the files to the exclusion list of avast!
Why do you think it’s a false positive?
Of course, it’s hard to say for sure without checking the real file, but google reveals many hits on VMInstaller.exe being malware.
VirtualMaid is an adware program that displays advertisements. VirtualMaid may contact msxpsupport.com periodically and copies itself copies itself as %System%\helper.exe. Similar programs that are associated with VirtualMaid are SearchMaid, PSGuard, Security iGuard and Smitfraud. They may hijack your Internet Explorer start page and hijack search engines to change the search queries.