I installed Avast this week after years with Norton antivirus, and found I had several viruses previously undetected by that expensive routine. One I am not able to delete is an old virus apparently that took up residence in my Microsoft Outlook file - outlook.pst. Avast locates it, but can not delete, and I can not move it into the virus chest. Any suggestions from anyone? I have to leave for several hours to lead a meeting, but will return this evening.
Avast should be able to move/delete this file on a boot time scan,access thru startAvast!/settings/shedule boot time scan then reboot.
good luck
You’ll lose all your Outlook settings if you did that, maybe you’ll prefer opening MS Outlook and save, at least, some emails or calendar options and apoitments…
It would be better if you submit the file to on-line scanners before delete it… just to be sure…
Submit the file to Jotti or Trendmicro or Virustotal.
Warning deleting the Outlook.pst file will remove all you emails I believe. This I believe is the big daddy of the email folders. I don’t believe avast can extract an individual email from within a .pst file so the only option is to delete the whole .pst file.
If the virus warning gives an indication of a single email you may be able to find that email within the Outlook folders and delete it to the deleted emails folder and then clear the deleted emails folder and compact all folders (whatever this is in Outlook). This could take some time to find it manually but should get rid of it without losing a folder.
Well, I decided to delete those old emails, and try the scan again. By the way, I tried the Trend Micro scan, and it did not produce a virus. I know definitely there was a bad file, however - the name of the file which was (The issues associated with this configuration.(fwd)\those.exe) were signs it was a virus - but I couldn’t move it or delete it. So I deleted the files, and found a second back up file in the computer I made some time ago, deleted it also, and scanned the Windows and it seems to be OK now. Thanks for your good advice!
Correction - I did not delete the files, but the emails in the deleted items folder.
Then as I said “clear the deleted emails folder and compact all folders (whatever this is in Outlook).” This should purge the emails (infected or otherwise) in the deleted items folder completely.