Avast has done a full scan of my pc and it came up with this after,
Unable to scan: The file is a decompression bomb?
what kind of file is this? does anybody know what this is?
It is c:\program files Electronic Arts\Battlefield 2142\mods\bf2142\Levels\Camp_Gibraltar\Client.zip\BaseDetailLayers.tga The file is a decompression bomb?
what is this?
It’s a compressed file, sometimes multi-compressed/packed, that when unpacked creates a huge volume of files.
See http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=8943
Probably nothing to be concerned about, if obtained via a trustworthy source.
Decompression bomb is a file that may be rather small, but decompresses to an enormous amount of data (when processed as a packed archive). Such file are not malicious per se, but they may block an antivirus program when it tries to scan them.
This kind of files is rather hard to detect (and avoid) precisely - so, it is possible that there are some false alarms. It’s not a big problem in this case, however - the “decompression bomb” announcement actually means something like “The file has a very high, maybe even suspicious, compression ratio and the AV is not going to scan the archive content”.
I’d suggest to ignore these files.
But you can change values into avast4.ini file to configure how avast should work with these files.
Click ‘Settings’ in my signature for more info 