every other day it seems that i am getting yet another false positive.

this morning it was faststone's image viewer.

i have submitted it (fsviewer.exe) for review.

why does this happen so often?

All antiviruses get false positives. A couple of days ago CA and Kaspersky were having some bad ones, and Symantec took down tens of thousands of computers in China not too long ago with some of its signatures. Not every piece of code in a piece of malware is "bad". It often uses the same code as "good" software. Clam checks its signatures against a lot of known "good" programs before releasing them, but it doesn't have every possible "good" program in its collection. In truth, it does need more Windows system software to check against, but I've been told that resources are limited. It was/is primarily used on email gateways using Linux, and Windows software isn't needed to serve those email clients.

Last I heard a month or so ago, the ClamWin developers were working on some solutions to help ClamWin users.

Regards,

I'm getting the same problem, Clamwin suddenly finds issues with files that haven't been touched in years.
The best way round this is to make sure Clamwin only reports and unloads the virus. Then use another scanner to double check the reported file.

They all do this so it's not unique to Clamwin. It could be worse some pay anti-virus have wiped out whole PCs with their false positives!

A recent check of Clam's false positive rate by comparing total reported false positives to total reported detections found that it is .001. That is, one tenth of one percent of total detections are false, which really isn't too bad--until it happens to you.

Regards,

i understand that sooner or later it's bound to happen... but in my case (at least for the last year or so) it's always been sooner than later. i have about 30 pc's here that scan every week and email me their report if any infections are found. i was very used to coming in on monday morning to find no email messages. lately no matter how hard i try i always get at least one infection report every week and truthfully i haven't seen one real infection, they are always false positives. i personally feel that the reason the false positive comparison is so low is because most people (especially people who are stretched for time) simply dismiss false positives and they end up going unreported; but they might actually take the time to report a file if they genuinely suspect it is viral. and i'm sure many real infections also go unreported, but probably not as many as false positives. i have only reported 2 or 3 false positives but i have received reports about hundreds of files over the last year that all seem to be fine. who knows. i just hope they are working to make it better and possibly alleviate this problem.