The really nice feature about this free tool is that it fixes the registry and repairs file associations for any virus it can remove - I haven’t seen this in a free tool before.

Free virus & worm removal tool

If, despite all the security measures you take, your computer gets infected by a virus or worm, it is necessary to disinfect your system somehow. While for some viruses the only 100% realiable method of disinfection is restoring your system from backups, for many common infections this is not really necessary and the virus/worm can be removed quite easily.

Removing the infection
The worms often schedule themselves to be run automatically when you start your operating system; some of them even register themselves to be run when any other application is started. Removing such a worm is not as simple as deleting it - when you just delete the worm file, your operating system might not be able to start your applications (such as Explorer) any more.

So, in order to properly remove the worm from your computer, it is often necessary to make additional fixes in your system registry, delete the links from your Startup Folder etc. Here the avast! Virus Cleaner comes - it will find and remove selected worms from your computer, as well as fix the registry and startup items to make sure your system will work correctly after the disinfection.

Many worms - when activated - create additional working files on your hard disk. Even though these files alone are harmless, they are useless and they should not be there. When avast! Virus Cleaner detects and removes a known worm from your computer, its working/temporary files are removed as well. The same applies for worm-specific registry entries, etc.

Solving other problems
If you have deleted a virus or worm file associated to a vital file type - and now you cannot run your applications anymore, avast! Virus Cleaner may help you as well. All you have to do is run avast! Virus Cleaner “somehow”. If, for example, only the association for .EXE files has been corrupted, you may run the avast! Virus Cleaner by renaming it to a .COM file. The other extensions you may try are .SCR, .BAT, .PIF (on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, you may try .CMD as well). If none of these extensions works (Windows is still reporting “Cannot find ‘xyz.exe’” when you try to start the tool), you can use avast! Virus Cleaner itself as a replacement for the missing file. However, you have to know the name of the missing file to do that; if you know it, just rename the avast! Virus Cleaner file to the missing name (and move it to the corresponding folder, if necessary). Now, starting any application should bring up avast! Virus Cleaner instead. As soon as it starts, it detects that some of the vital file associations are corrupted, reports the problem and allows you to fix it immediately.