In avast! 4.1.418 antivirus version both Home/Pro if you right clicked on a compressed file and clicked scan the name of the file and corresponding extension if a virus was contained in the compressed file it would delete the file in the archive and leave the rest of the archive intact. But this is not true in the 4.5.495 or .494 version of avast! antivirus. In the current BETA it deletes the whole compressed file if delete is chosen. I would appreciate any and all help in looking into this issue… As of this post it has been tested on .rar and .zip files. The program versions used for WinRAR is 3.40 and WinZip is 9.0 SR-1. I hope this helps.

This is on purpose - I have changed the behavior because I think it’s better this way.
In particular, if - after deleting the virus from the archive - only an “empty archive” would be left, the whole archive is deleted instead. There is no point in keeping an empty ZIP or RAR file (a 20-30 bytes header in fact). The main reason for that were ZIPped viruses in e-mails - it’s better to remove the attachment completely than to keep an empty ZIP inside.
Of course, if you put more files into the archive, the uninfected ones will be left inside. There are also other limits (bigger files, such as SFX archives, won’t be deleted as whole). The behavior is not limited to Explorer-extension, the other scanners (Simple, Enhanced, …) should work the same.

Or, are you saying that the whole archive is deleted even when there are other (clean) files inside?

Thanks for the quick reply Igor. I apreciate the detailed explaination. Thanks for the help. Problem solved.