I use W7. I have always liked Clamwin, but not having any way to fix what it finds has been a problem for me. To fix anything, I have to do it manually, which can take a lot of time.

The main problem, though, is that a VERY large number of files and folders cannot be scanned: "permission denied."

I am the ONLY user of my PC, so I'm the administrator. How can Clamwin deny permissions to me?

I stopped using Clamwin, but have recently reinstalled it, hoping that problem would be gone. It wasn't.

Your scanner is the best I've found anywhere. My last scan found 54 nasties on my system. No other scanner finds anything but PUPs.

With all these infections, there are very likely more in the files and folders which are unscannable.

HOW can I get rid of the "permission denied" thing?

And are you planning ways to deal with malware, like a Quarantine and a repair option?

I would not worry too much about the permissions denied. I have not seen any malware involved with this. If you installed ClamWin by selecting run as an administrator (from the Windows Explorer right click menu), that is all you can do. Those programs are either running during the scan or locked by then system.

ClamWin tends to get more false detections (false positives) than other AV programs.

You should not have to manually take care of a detection by ClamWin. Set the infected file option to Quarantine--do not use remove or Report.

ClamWin will probably never be able to repair an infection. It is dependent upon the Clam AV scan engine.

You can restore falsely detected files by running the QRecover program found in the ClamWin programs\bin folder.

Because ClamWin is an "on demand" scanner, it does not scan in real-time as files are placed or executed on your computer. It should only be used as a backup scanner to a real-time AV, such as Windows Defender (Security Essentials for operating systems before Windows 8). There are also other good free or commercial scanners.

Thanks for using ClamWin!

I agree, and the problem is getting worse with each new release of Windows. Scan the C: drive of your average Windows 10 machine and you'll get a hundred such messages. In fact, the scan log would show more, but I suspect it hits an internal limit on how many are displayed (I know this because each time I add these in-use files to my exceptions list, the litany of "permission denied" messages just moves farther down the alphabet, like towards C:\Windows\WinSxS). Here's a snippet:



You have to do a lot of scrolling to find any positive files. It's high time an option was added to suppress such messages!

Yes there should be an option. I would go even further to suggest that it be included in the scan code and suppressed so the user will not see anything. These messages may alarm some users. In the meantime, I suggest that you just exclude any folders where this is too much to bear.

Unfortunately, I think this comes from the scan code itself, and the ClamWin developers are reluctant to change any of it. It would have to be re-done with each new verson of Clam AV ported over to ClamWin.

Re Windows 10: you don't really need ClamWin. Windows Defender provides better protection.

Thanks for using ClamWin!

Regards,

Sorry, I said "exceptions list" but meant "exclusions list". So yes, I'm already adding these files and folders to my exclusions list. But even with liberal use of wildcards ("?" and "*"), it still makes my exclusion list really long, which probably slows scans.


I'm sorry to hear that ClamWin is falling so far behind the competition that it's hardly worth the effort anymore. Ten years ago we had high hopes for this open-source project. Now, bugs are allowed to persist indefinitely, updates are rarely released, we haven't even hit version 1.0 yet, and people involved with the project are losing faith in it. Furthermore, the ClamWin forums don't have nearly the traffic they used to.

Yes, a good antivirus effort needs people and resources, and ClamWin has never had much of either. The field is even getting harder for lots of commercial AVs, who might not be around if a few really good AVs (like Bit Defender) did not license their scan engines and virus signatures to them.

I think there is a chance that Clam AV (with Cisco's resources) will stay in the game, and ClamWin might benefit. Clam AV has been improved under the hood (note that it can now use Yara signatures, and so can ClamWin), but Cisco does not want Clam AV to compete with its commercial security products. What ClamWin needs is to fork off of the Clam AV email scan code port and develop some proprietary code for its use on Windows machines like real-time scanning, non-signature heuristics, and malicious web site protection. Let's see what happens by the time Clam AV 1.0 comes around.

Thanks for using ClamWin!

Regards,