Cleaning up after Anti-Viruses

Cleaning up after Anti-Viruses

Nikhil Rastogi, Jun 01, 2008 1220 hrs IST

Anti-Virus programs do catch the culprits and remove them -- but what happens in the aftermath?

Change -- it's ever so constant! It itself never changes but manifests change in everything else. That's a law of the universe. This law itself never changes. It's almost always surprising to see something breaking this universal law itself. What am I blabbering about? Anti-Virus programs.

After computing for so many years, one thing certainly has changed much, the way Anti-Virus programs work. No, I'm not talking about the better level of detection or heuristic scanning which has gotten better over time or the additional scanning methods employed by Anti-Virus vendors; I'm talking about "After-Virus Blues."

What I mean by "After-Virus Blues" is Anti-Virus programs do catch the culprits and remove them -- but what happens in the aftermath? Often virus being caught means the source "exe" is removed/quarantined but what about the associated damage that the virus leaves behind such as numerous registry entries, startup entries, the additional dll's/inf files which don't just sit there twiddling their thumbs but quickly become a pain in the wrong place with an error message or two saying some inane exe is missing or hard-drives when double-clicked keep popping up with "Open files with" dialog which shouldn't be there.

Don't get me wrong, Anti-Virus vendors are doing a phenomenal job, but there are two main things that Anti-Virus programs ought to be doing.

a. Excellent virus detection and removal -- which I've no complain about,
b. Cleaning up after the virus has already run havoc -- which is the weak point of these programs.

It is very disconcerting to know that in spite of Anti-Viruses catching the latest and the greatest threat and boasting about its own robustness, never do a good job at cleaning up after the virus has run havoc. All that is left up to the user is to run up an additional cost to call the technician (or your friendly neighbourhood computer geek) to do the final cleanup job themselves that Anti-Viruses ought to have prevented in the first place. Even if you cannot prevent a virus at least have a good solid way to cleanup the mess and not keep users hanging loose in the middle.

Yes, I know many Anti-Virus companies do release specialised virus cleaning utilities; it's a hit- and miss-situation! Sometimes, the software works, sometimes it doesn't. Not only that, the user has no way of identifying this specialised utility unless he himself searches for a removal utility. Anti-Virus programs aren't even built to be capable of informing the user to download the specialised utility directly through their site. This kind of knowledge only a fairly capable computer adept would have which essentially leaves out hundreds-thousands of computer users. This boils down to Anti-Virus vendors failing to do their job or let's be fair -- failing to complete their job.

Though unfortunately this is the state of affairs today, I do hope it changes for the better later on. But as of now dear users, we are left to our own ingenuity to solve our own virus blues. With that, I come to various common practices that ought to help you out of a sticky situation.