Why some Anti-Virus programs dislike BitComet.

[Rhubarb]

With almost every update to BitComet, we get a short flurry of posts complaining about a virus or trojan.

There isn't one!

If there was one, the forum would be swamped with complaints - that doesn't happen and we only get a handful of people claiming that it is 'infected'

However, perhaps this will help explain why it happens (from the installation notes on another app)

"This release's binary is packed with an executable/dll compression tool to
reduce his size (for an easy and quick upload/download).

Unfortunately, some of these compression programs have a bad reputation in the
security software industry, mainly because almost 99% of trojans/worms/etc.
are packed with similar tools (or variants of these), and this self-unpack
behavior is taken by some antivirus apps as an alarm signal.

Basically, this means that any trusted program packed with one of these tools
can be erroneously detected as a virus, something known as a "FALSE POSITIVE"."

The 'cure'  is simple - once the program has been downloaded (and any respectable A/V app would have scanned it on the download), TURN OFF THE A/V BEFORE INSTALLING and turn it back on after installation is completed.  If there had been anything nasty in the file, the A/V would have caught it during the download.