Just downloaded ClamWin 0.88 for use on a Win98 system that is arguably lacking a bit of horsepower (Cel 400 with 128 mb RAM, 40Gb drive with 2Gb free), so the scan runs slowly. The scan goes well for a long period (hours) and then hangs with no further disc activity. This is similar to a problem reported earlier that was fixed by deleting a certain file to remove it from the scan. To quote that poster: "It turned out to be a zero length hidden/system file" causing the hang.

However, it doesn't seem that would be the same fault in my case because each time it has hung while looking at a different file type each time. I have run it both as a background process while doing other work on the PC and then also run it after rebooting in SAFE mode with no other processes running. Either way, ClamWin eventually hangs and has to be killed.

Open source software is the way of the future, so I hope that other users can help nut out this problem :-)

Gavin.

PROBLEM FIXED:
After fiddling around with a few more tries at scanning c: it seemed that most frequently the scan was barfing on one particular file. Even though a couple of times my system froze completely showing different files in the status window, this turned out to be a red herring. So, my problem was similar to a previous poster, only it didn't barf at zero-length files for me, but at file(s) with an extension of xpi, as in c:/windows/temp/tmp-8.xpi. Like that previous poster, I determined that these files (probably) weren't mission critical and deleted them before running a successful full-drive scan. I've only used a couple of virus scanners in the past, but it seems poor to completely kill/freeze the scanning when finding certain files rather than pass them over and report an error. I'll see about filing a bug report on it.

BTW: My low-specification PC was struggling, taking 1329 minutes to scan only 87743 files occupying 10687 Mb. I'll also be putting in a feature request to allow scanning of only new & modified files since last full scan. If the app can't offer that then I'll never want to scan when it takes a full 24 hours or more. ClamWin is Good Work that can only get better with user feedback. Thanks guys.

Gavin