password protected

Can anyone tell me how to get rid of the pass word protected status that comes up after a full virus scan. Because the virus checker is unable to get through these files enabling it to check it properly, and there seems to be a lot of my files that are protected and i don`t recall putting passwords on them all.

Avast! can’t scan password protected files, because they are protected.
That’s not only avast!, none antivirus can scan password protected files. :wink:

You can do a forum search about that. This topic has been discussed a lot of times :wink:

Many programs (usually security based ones) password protect their files for legitimate reasons such as AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy, there are others.

When you run scans with the above programs and you delete harmful entries that they detect, a copy is kept (in quarantine/restore/backup) in case you need to reverse what you did. These are usually password protected, you should do some housekeeping and delete old backup/recovery/quarantine entries (older than two weeks or so), this will reduce the numbers of files that can’t be scanned.

By examining 1) the reason given by avast! for not being able to scan the files, 2) the location of the files, you can get an idea of what program they relate to.

Files that can’t be scanned are just that, not an indication they are suspicious/infected, just unable to be scanned.