Hi all. if anyone can enlighten me on what is going on with my clamwin, or if YOU have had this problem let me know. I am scanning both memory AND files as administrator first off. While the scan takes a lot of time, in the middle my laptop simply SHUT DOWN. When I tried to turn it back on....It wouldn't. I waited a few minutes and booted back up I don't know why but when I restarted I got an error message that said ERRNO 22....Invalid Argument.

Anyone have any ideas for me? This software came highly recommended by my husband's computer guru who takes care of his business so I trusted it. How would I know if I have a virus, it can't seem to complete it's scan cycle

Do you happen to know in what stage the computer shut down ? Was it still scanning memory files or disk files ?

Check your settings, and on the general tab, uncheck "Remove infected files from computer memory". This would be the feature with the highest risk to mess up your system while it is running. Also on the General tab, choose "Report Only" to be sure nothing is removed/replaced. With those settings, ClamWin will not do anything that changes your system, it will only report you whether or not infections have been found.

Also have a look at the scan log (if one was created) and see if that says something about problems or infections.

PS : I have heard of viruses that shut down the system when they detect they are being scanned, to prevent detection by AVs. If you scan with the above settings and still have the same problem, you might want to reboot in Safe Mode and scan again.

hope this helps you,
Peter

Thanks so much! I will try it!

I hope this works! it has me worried!

There have been some "fuzzed" archive files that have recently been in the news with the ability to cause problems. Perhaps you have one of these files, although this is pretty new. The links below will give you some additional information. If this is what you have, uncheck ClamWin's Scan In Archives preference and that might fix it.

https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/ and then also https://isc.sans.org/ on the Web.

Regards,

Thanks, I did what you said, and it's running now, although very slow.....I am leaning toward going and buying NAV. I had McAfee and It does not like Vista which is what I have on this laptop : (

ClamWin is an on-demand antivirus scanner (scans only when you tell it to). You can set up automated scans (Scheduled Preferences) of your computer when you will not be using it--say late at night.

You can speed up ClamWin scans if you do some configuring (setting Preferences). You don't need to scan every file in every directory. There are about 50 or so file type extensions (.exe, .scr and others) that are most likely to be infected by viruses/malware. You can set ClamWin's Filter Preferences to scan only for those file types. You can do a Google search for "dangerous file extensions" to identify them.

Finally, since ClamWin doesn't scan in real-time (as files are opened/closed), you should be using a real-time scanner and use ClamWin as a "backup" scanner until a real-time capability is developed in Version 1.0. You don't necessarily have to use/pay for Norton. It is expensive and usles lots of computer resources. There are several good free antivirus scanners: AntiVir (from Avira), AVG (from AVG/Grisoft), and Avast (from Alwil) that you can download on the Web. You should also use an antispyware program--Windows Defender is capable and free, and a firewall (Windows XP firewall comes free and is capable).

Regards,