Yesterday I came down with a similar situation although it was after doing a full scan and not an out-of-the-blue Avast! warning. The full scan said that it found 3 “corrupt” files. I followed Avast! instructions and it moved the first 2 files to the Virus Chest (it wouldn’t move the 3rd, probably because it had already done that with its doppleganger, the 1st file, which it could no longer find, probably because it was already in the virus Chest). I then continued to follow Avast!'s instructions. rebooted along with a boot-time scan. The pc rebooted after that and I experienced just what someone else on the Forum mentioned: after the reboot the system (Windows 7) seemed fine but: (1) Avast! wouldn’t run, (2) most of the applications wouldn’t run (my Control Panel was not, however, empty, and seemed to work normally). Virtually all of the rest of my applications were DOA (e.g., Firefox, Word, Excel, Avast!, IE, folders, etc.). Example, I clicked on the Ad-Aware icon and the software did not open, did not run. It was as if it were no longer stored on the pc. The speculation is that this was caused by moving kernel32.dll to the virus Chest…It may, in fact, be a system file, critical for Windows 7 to function - c:\windows\sysWOW64\kernel32.dll|>[emul]) and was probably NOT infected (a false positive). I used a similar solution to what was suggested in someone else’s post: In the Command Prompt type SFC /Scannow. Once it’s finished running, corrupted files will be repaired and your .exe’s will work once again. After running the scan (about 25 min) I received a message from Windows saying “Windows Resource Protection found corrupted files and successfully repaired them. Details are included in the CBS.log windr\logs\CBS\CBS.log” After that message I rebooted and ran a new Full Avast! scan: it found no problems. More importantly, the pc appears to be running normally again. Good luck!