is it normal to find a lot of locked and corrupt files on scan?

Hello!

I’ve been using Avast for a couple of months (free version), and I’ve had a couple of virus “hits” recently, including one I picked up from a website.

I THINK my system is clean now, but on doing an Avast Scan (deep scan), there are a lot of “unable to scan” errors, either because of a “corrupted file” or a “password locked” file. Can’t seem to recall getting this kind of thing in the past, say, with Noron or AVG.

The errors are concentrated in specific folders, most notably %/application data/% for “Spybot”, a trojan hunter; program files/java/…/… “MANIFEST.MF” files; Pest Patrol (another Trojan hunter); Macromedia Coldfusion & Dreamweaver/more “MANIFEST.MF” types; Norton Cleansweep/clnsweep.cfg/EXE’s…

In some cases, the files are labelled as “password protected”.

Is this a normal thing, or should I be concerned here?

thanks for any feedback…

Garbanzo

It’s a normal thing - try to search this board for more info.

It’s normal to see Spybot files password protected.
It’s not normal see ‘corrupted’ files… Can you post the report scanning for analysis here? At least, the part of them you are not so sure of the results?

garbanzo,

A bit more information here for you.
You will find many files “passworded” because they are system files and this prevents accidental tampering.

Avast will mark Spybot files as “unable to scan”. This is fine and normal behavior.

Pest Patrol does not code their signature files in a manner that Avast can read and therefore it causes the Unable to Scan error. This is also normal behavior.

As Technical has stated, the corrupted files MAY be a problem. We need to know what they are before a determination can be made.

Try running the Avast Scan with the sensitivity set a bit lower to see what happens. Although it is not likely, false positives can result.

techie