What happens to stuff in the virus chest?
How long does it stay there and what happens if it fills up?
And if you delete the item, where does it go? Presumably it’s still lurking in your hard drive somewhere?
It stays there where it is safe from the rest of your machine.
Forever I believe. You can change the settings of the Avast Virus Chest to zero (0) so that it can accommodate more so that it won’t fill up as quickly. If it becomes too full, it will delete (purge) itself.
It goes bye, bye. It’s gone forever. So if it is a file that is needed to run your machine…it’s gone forever. 
That is why we tell people to not delete files, but instead to put it in the Virus Chest and keep it there for several weeks while it can be investigated and rescanned. While it sits in the Chest, you can right-click it after getting several Avast updates to see if it is a false positive (FP) or not. If it is a FP, you can sometimes restore it or delete it at that point. You can also upload files from items in the Chest to Avast to be checked for FP or real malware…another reason to put it in the Chest.
So if virus chest purges itself, where do the viruses go - into the atmosphere?
Where do files go when you delete them (permanently, not into the Recycle bin)?
Well, the items from Chest, when deleted, go to exactly the same place.
The contents are deleted, gone, history, bit bucket in the sky. They aren’t restored, they aren’t saved, they aren’t sent to the recycle bin, they are completely removed.
I’m not being awkward but this is mystifying me.
I understood, please correct me if I’m wrong, that even if you “delete” something on a pc, it doesn’t actually get deleted but stays somewhere on your hardrive - unless you have software to permanently delete files. Hence those naughty people downloading inappropriate images, then delete them and then stupidly take their pc/laptop in for repair, get a huge shock when these images are found and get reported to the police! They are daft enough to think delete means delete!
So when these files get “purged” by Avast are you saying Avast has some software built into it that destroys the items in the virus chest?
I have five things in the chest - think they are worms/trojans - so if I right click and delete them, where do they go - are they permanently deleted or are they lurking somewhere on my hard drive. So should I not touch them, leave them in the chest and wait for them to get purged?
I’ve noticed one item for some software I uploaded. Always check it’s from a reliable sourced and always run a scan on any software I upload - so obviously this worm got through undetected by Avast.
Thanks for your advice.
I understood, please correct me if I'm wrong, that even if you "delete" something on a pc, it doesn't actually get deleted but stays somewhere on your hardrive - unless you have software to permanently delete files. Hence those naughty people downloading inappropriate images, then delete them and then stupidly take their pc/laptop in for repair, get a huge shock when these images are found and get reported to the police! They are daft enough to think delete means delete!
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question578.htm
A common misconception is that the data is actually removed from the hard drive (erased) when you delete a file. Any time that a file is deleted on a hard drive, it is not erased. Instead, the tiny bit of information that points to the location of the file on the hard drive is erased. This pointer, along with other pointers for every folder and file on the hard drive, is saved in a section near the beginning of the hard drive and is used by the operating system to compile the directory tree structure. By erasing the pointer file, the actual file becomes invisible to the operating system. Eventually, the hard drive will write new data over the area where the old file is located.
you can run CCleaner drive wipe (free space only )
http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/using-ccleaner/wiping-free-disk-space
Safe Surf says a deleted virus “goes bye, bye. It’s gone forever” - and DavidR says
“The contents are deleted, gone, history, bit bucket in the sky. They aren’t restored, they aren’t saved, they aren’t sent to the recycle bin, they are completely removed”
How are they removed? Whether Avast “purges” them or one deletes them?
Is a virus or a file with a virus different from any other file that you delete, but doesn’t actually get deleted and remnants of the file are still on the hard drive?
I’m just interested that’s all.
Sure, when a file is deleted (in an ordinary way), only the corresponding area of the hard disk is marked as deleted and the particular folder entry is removed - without really overwriting the content. Subsequent restoration is sometimes possible, but is generally unreliable - the operating system may overwrite the “freed” block by another file (just being created) a second later, the recovery may be prevented by disk fragmentation, etc.
Yes, avast! deletes the file in the usual way - so yes, you might be able to recover the malware files afterwards. But you’d have to do it manually yourself, the malware certainly won’t do it itself - and why would you do that?