NewHeur_PE virus

My latest computer virus scan has quarantined 2 NewHeur_PE virus, one located in City of Heroes\cityofheroes.exe and one in City of Heroes\tempfile. I use ESET NOD 32 antivirus 4.

I have been experiencing a lot of crashes/game freezing to screen playing since 24th June - no crashes at all before this time. Could this be due to the virus somehow infecting the game even though the virus has been quarantined by NOD? And... has anybody else experienced the same?

Also...does anyone know how I can remove it from my computer, I feel so unclean?

Which antivirus are you using? And whichever antivirus it is do you have heuristic checks turned on? If so then it's probably a false positive.

Also do you have automatic updates turned on for windows? There was a recent update that has caused problems with some systems. A possible solution is to restore your computer to a point a couple weeks back and see if that fixes the problem. If it does then it was probably the update.

You can also try deleting the cityofheroes.exe file and then redownloading it. If your antivirus still detects a virus in the file then it is almost certainly a false positive.

NOD32 has had several false positives over the years with CoH files. I'd recommend trying Mandu's suggestion of deleting the file and redownloading it to see if it's still detected as a virus.

I would suggest getting a better AV program as well, such as AVG or Avast.

That's most definitely a false positive. You should either add COH to the list of exceptions so NOD won't try to "clean" it, or get a better antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials is my current recommendation; AVG and Avast have been adding bloat and more bloat recently).

"Heur" is short for "Heuristics", and it means the antivirus "guessed" that COH is a virus due to "suspicious behavior", most likely caused because the executable file changes with each patch.

If in doubt, send the presumably infected .exe file to virustotal.com to have it scanned by 42 different antivirus products.

AVG and Avast are not better than NOD32. I personally have one machine running NOD32 and one using AVG and consider NOD32 the superior software. Avast is one I've use in the past and I like it better than AVG and would probably go with it over NOD32 now too, as it scans faster, but I don't think there's really enough difference in quality between the two to justify a switch.

As for the NOD32 false positive on CoH, I simply did my research to make sure it was a false positive and then added an exception.

A good site to start with if you're looking to upgrade your AV software is www.av-comparatives.org.

Thanks guys for all your knowledgeable responses.

I have tried a system restore Mandu, but things still seem to be the same so the problem doesnt appear to be a Microsoft update - I do have it set to update automatically. Deleting and re-downloading COH.exe file seems a lot work, wont it take ages? However will do this as a last resort.

I did as you suggested Morgan and did another scan using Housecall, also scanned with Microsoft while I was at it - neither picked up that Heur virus. I sent a copy to NOD, but they havent replied yet.

As for changing my antivirus product from NOD to something else runt9 - I changed from Bullgard to NOD in March after researching which AV to use - so I'm with Kosmos on this one. Hubby is very happy with Microsoft - but what does he know (j/k) the only game he plays is Minesweeper.

I will add CoH as an exception in NOD32 as you suggested Kosmos.

Once again, thanks guys for your help it's been much appreciated.

I forgot about Microsoft Security Essentials, but it's also one of the top free AVs out there, as it's generally very un-intrusive. I use Avast, personally, but I've used AVG, Avast, and MSE and all of them worked fine.