Avast with Spybot

[Ron49]

Hello group,

I'm running Avast home, the latest version, with Vista. Scan results give me about 30 hits under Spybot S&D that it says can't be scanned because they're password-protected. I never set up a password for Spybot. But Spybot does require administrative privileges under Vista. Could this be what Avast means?

thanx,
Ron

[oldman]

Spybot itself will password protect it's backup,quarentine,etc files. Avast doesn't know the password and report as such. The same will happen withother security programs' files. It's normal and nothing to worry about.

[DavidR]

Many programs (usually security based ones) password protect their files for legitimate reasons such as AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy, there are others (and avast doesn't know the password or have any way of using it even if it did know it).

When you run scans with the above programs and you delete harmful entries that they detect, a copy is kept (in quarantine/restore/backup) in case you need to reverse what you did. These are usually password protected, you should do some housekeeping and delete old backup/recovery/quarantine entries (older than two weeks or so), this will reduce the numbers of files that can't be scanned.

By examining 1) the reason given by avast! for not being able to scan the files, 2) the location of the files, you can get an idea of what program they relate to. You may need to expand the column headings to see all the text.

Files that can't be scanned are just that, not an indication they are suspicious/infected, just unable to be scanned.