What does "offline" mean.

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

OS= winxp tab ed sp 3 avast 4.8 prof

What does avast mean when it says it can’t scan a file because it is “offline”.

The file avast marked as offline on the last scan of my hard drive was winstart.bat. It’s a 2 kb file, hidden, read only file in c:\windows that is empty when opened w/ notepad. I cked it for alternate streams and there were none.

Per an MS article [http://support.microsoft.com/support.../Q134/4/02.ASP] winstart.bat was a file in Win95 used to load certain TSR programs into memory & I guess it’s a file for using that virtual emulation pre win2k/winxp environments that I’ve never done. I don’t see the file anywhere in msconfig and I doubt any program loads it.

What makes avast mark a file as offline?

2

It’s not avast! that marks the file as offline - it’s already marked as such (though who/what did it, that’s another question - because it’s hardly correct).
As for what it means… here is some explanation.