When your computer gets infected by a virus or worm, the virus often schedule itself 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 of it is not as simple as deleting it - after deleting the worm file, your operating system might not be able to start your applications (such as Explorer) any more. 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. avast! Virus Cleaner can also deactivate the virus present in memory. There is no need to start the tool from a Safe Mode - just start it and it will take care of the rest!

avast! Virus Cleaner removes the following worm families:

• Badtrans
• Beagle (aka Bagle) (A-L, U, W, X)
• Blaster (A-M)
• BugBear (A, B, E)
• Ganda
• Klez/Elkern, all variants
• MiMail, (A, C, E, I-N, Q, S-U)
• Mydoom (A,B,D,F including the Trojan horse)
• Nachi/Welchia (A-G)
• Netsky (aka Moodown) (A-Z)
• Nimda
• Opas (aka Opasoft, Opaserv)
• Scold
• Sircam
• Sober (A-F)
• Sobig (B-F)
• Swen, incl. UPX variant
• Yaha (aka Lentin) all variants

avast! Home Edition includes the following components:

• On Demand Scanner - with Skinnable Simple Interface - just select what do you want to scan in which way and press the Play button.
• On Access Scanner - resident scanning of all files being opened, read and written and behavior blocker monitoring dangerous actions of viruses.
• E-mail scanner easily integrates with most mail clients and it checks both incoming and outgoing mails, it provides heuristic analysis of mail content to protect against new Worms.
• Network Shield - scans traffic for malicious content - lightweight Firewall.
• Resident protection for IM programs (e.g. MSN Messenger, ICQ) and P2P programs (e.g. Kazaa, DirectConnect).
• Boot Time Scanner - scans disks in the same way and in the same time as Windows CHKDSK does (on NT/2000/XP only).
• Explorer Scanner - right click on the object allows you to scan it.
• Screen Saver Scanner - scans PC during your coffee breaks.
• Virus Chest - safety isolated folder to store infected, suspicious and even some system files - to restore them.

avast! 4 Home is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japaneese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and other languages - check http://www.avast.com/eng/down_home.html to download avast! in your language.

Version 4.6 adds Web Shield, NNTP (Newsgroup) Scanner, Lower Memory Footprint, three new Languages.