Some people say that disinfecting is a bad idea. Is that true?
Disinfection is completely “safe” only if the disinfecting process completely restores the non-infected state of the object. That is, not only must the virus be removed from the object, but the original length must be restored exactly, as well as any system attributes (such as time and date of last modification, fields in the header, etc). Sometimes it is necessary to be sure that the object is placed on the same sectors of the disk that it occupied prior to infection (this is particularly important for some system areas and some files from programs which use certain kinds of self-checking or copy protection). None of the currently available disinfecting programs do all this. For instance, because of the bugs that exist in many viruses and because some infection processes involve overwriting (part of) the objects of infection, some of the information about the original object may be irrevocably destroyed. Sometimes it is not even possible to detect that this information has been destro
