Question about Avast Home Edition

[haydee]

Hi everyone
I downloaded the free Avast Home Edition few days ago. It was
phenomenal since it found two files that were unable to be opened
by other virus scanners. I ran the Avast scanner this morning and it scanned for
a while and at the end appeared a long list of files and on the side it
said " unable to scan". All the long list said the same thing. Any suggestions?
Thanks
haydee

[DavidR]

avast also tels you why they can't be scanned.

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.

[haydee]

Thank you DavidR
 I ran the Avast scan again and it showed around 23 files with the same "Unable to scan" message.
I clicked on one of the files and scanned it individually and a small window appeared
saying " An error has ocurred during processing of 1 result (s)

example of one of the files:
c:\Documents and settings\Haydee Cortes\..\SIKEOTSR.ttf   Unable to scan Ar..


 I opened the AD-Adware personal version I have and
 I checked the quarantine and there I found few files under MRU List.
The other list is all tracking cookies. What is MRU List?
I don't dare to delete anything since I don't know much about
computers and I'm afraid to do something wrong.
Thanks again,
haydee

[Lisandro]

c:\Documents and settings\Haydee Cortes\..\SIKEOTSR.ttf   Unable to scan Ar..

Can you expand the hidden info by the ... points?

AD-Adware personal version
What is MRU List?

Microsoft Recent Used files. You can delete these items detected by Ad-aware with safe.

[DavidR]

Thank you DavidR
<snip>
example of one of the files:
c:\Documents and settings\Haydee Cortes\..\SIKEOTSR.ttf   Unable to scan Ar..

As I said you may need to expand the column headings to see all the text, what comes after the Ar... bit, which is probably Archive corrupt (nothing to worry about).

I opened the AD-Adware personal version I have and
 I checked the quarantine and there I found few files under MRU List.
The other list is all tracking cookies. What is MRU List?
I don't dare to delete anything since I don't know much about
computers and I'm afraid to do something wrong.

They are all ready in effect deleted as they are in AdAware's Quarantine area (not where they were originally), so there are no worries of deleting these 'old' quarantined items after a few weeks if there haven't already been any problems.

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