Some people say that disinfecting files is a bad idea. Is that true?
Disinfecting a file is completely “safe” only if the disinfecting process restores the non-infected state of the object completely. That is, not only the virus must be removed from the file, but the original length of the file must be restored exactly, as well as its time and date of last modification, all fields in the header, etc. Sometimes it is necessary to be sure that the file is placed on the same clusters of the disk that it occupied prior to infection. If this is not done, then a program which uses some kind of self-checking or copy protection may stop functioning properly, if at all. None of the currently available disinfecting programs do all this. For instance, because of the bugs that exist in many viruses, some of the information of the original file is destroyed and cannot be recovered. Other times, it is even impossible to detect that this information has been destroyed and to warn the user. Furthermore, some viruses corrupt information very slightly and in a random way
