I am running avast! Endpoint Protection on one WinXP machine. I've been running a nightly quick scan and a full system scan every Sunday night (the full system scan takes almost five hours, so it's seldom practical to run it daily).
Last night's full system scan found a malware result on the I:\ drive, which is actually a partition of the main drive established when the computer was first built. avast! moved the file to the vault and prompted a restart and boot-time scan, which I did. The boot-time scan found three more infected files on the I:\ partition and moved them to the vault as well.
As a precaution, I ran another scan on the partition drive. This time, it found nothing, but gave me a lengthy list of "Error: Archive is password protected (42056)" results for one of the subdirectories of I:\, which as far as I can tell contains what seem to be preinstaller files for McAfee. (I assume they were installed by the computer's manufacturer, as I don't use McAfee and have no McAfee applications installed.) No previous full system scan or scan of the partition drive has ever returned a "password protected" error on these files in the time I've been using avast! -- I looked again at the logs and there were no such error messages from previous scans of that drive letter.
I also have Spyboy Search & Destroy+AV 2.4, so I ran that on the partition drive as well and found ANOTHER infected file (I:\MiniNT\system32\RisDep), which Spybot removed.
The fact that the allegedly locked files (a) haven't previously given any error and (b) are on a partition that had (so far) five infected files, of which avast! found only four, gives me great concern that there's some broader infection that avast! isn't finding. I'm also wondering if I should delete the McAfee preinstaller files as potentially suspicious.
If anyone has any suggestions, they would be much appreciated. This doesn't fill me with confidence about avast!, to say the least.
