Please, help me to remove this virus...

Question

Hello everybody!
I just bought my imac (because i didn't want to deal with virus anymore) and I transfered all my folders from my old pc notebook on it... Now,some of those folders doesn't want to be deleted after being reorganized and emptied, and when I run avast on my mac, it detects a virus 'Malware-gen' and a lot off 'errors', I don't really know what this is and I can't delete them. The last 4 time i run Avast, it stopped by himself
With a error message :
The application com.avast.MAD quit unexpectedly
Mac Os and other applications are not affected
Click relaunch to laucnch the application again. Cick report to see more details or send a report to Apple
The 2nd message I get from avast is :
The file scan deamon died scanning path
of 2 paths (1 remains). Do you want to scan again when the deamon is relaunches?
Does somebody can help me to remove those virus(es) ?
Thank you for your future answers
cycy

Answer 1

I never heard of avast until now. User comments at versiontracker.com don't seem to speak very highly of it, with one poster stating that it is worse than the viruses it claims to guard against. You might want to consider removing avast from your system and trying the free clamxav scanner instead.
According to one antivirus website of whom I have never heard, malware-gen is a windows-only virus, so it can't affect you in a Mac environment. If you are running Windows on your Mac and this Windows virus is real, that's a different story. But another antivirus website of whom I have heard didn't show a virus by this name in their database.
clamxav will identify (these orphaned) windows viruses and you can set it up to "quarantine" and I think delete them, or at least locate them so that you can deal with them manually. To the best of my knowledge, there are zero Mac OS X viruses and maybe four trojans/worms that all require a successful social engineering deception to install.
Your inability to remove files and folders may be nothing more than an innocent permissions and/or ownership issue related to your having transferred them from a Windows computer. Select the files/folders in Finder, Get Info them, and look at the sharing and permissions. Make sure you have read and write privileges for affected files and folders, as well as for all of the folders' contents. Also make sure that you are the owner of all those files and folders and their contents. Then you should be able to delete them.