I'm a little confused about the virus chest, does deleting the file from the chest remove the file from my hard drive or does it just remove it from the virus chest?
That depends on how/why it is in the virus chest.
1. If avast detected it as malware/virus, etc. and avast sent it to the chest, then that is its only location and copy. In which case deleting it from there is final, no other copies anywhere.
2. If you manually add it to the chest (you think it suspicious/infected but no alert from avast), you are only copying it to the avast virus chest and a copy still exists in the original location and only copy. Deleting it from the chest in this case is only deleting the avast virus chest and not the original location copy.
