Scan stops at tracking.log

After six months of no problems with NOD32, Version 3, on WinXP, it started hanging during a manual scan at the System Volume Information folder on the "tracking.log" file. After some searching online, I found that antivirus scans that stall on tracking.log is a common problem. I tried deleting tracking.log in safe mode and letting Windows create a new file, but that didn't help. Only adding tracking.log to the file exception list in NOD32 solved the problem.

I couldn't find a reference to this problem in this forum, so I would appreciate any input.

1. Have others here dealt with this problem?

2. Is there any risk in excluding tracking.log from the virus scan?

3. Is there a better fix?

 

Couldn't it be that it's simply a large text file which takes more time to be scanned?

 

The tracking.log file is only 20K in my instance, and NOD32 would stall for hours with no CPU or disk access time being used by NOD32. Even attempting to open this file in notepad would cause notepad to hang up. Likewise, right-clicking tracking.log to view properties would hang up explorer.

Search for "tracklog.log" and "system volume information" on the web and you will find a lot of references to this problem, but no real solution other than excluding it from the scan.

 

Please disable the real-time protection temporarily, compress the file with WinRAR/ZIP (protect it with the password "infected") and send it to support[at]eset.com with this thread's url enclosed.

 

I tried shutting down System Restore, then booting in safe mode to get access to tracking.log, but I could not compress the file. It just wouldn't appear in the zip file despite several attempts using different approaches, so I can't send it to ESET support.

I doubt that the file is infected. It is well documented in many AV forums that this has been a problem for a number of years. Common opinion is that Zone Alarm creates the problem, though I haven't found out why or how, just a comment that a beta release of Zone Alarm supposedly fixes the problem.

Here are a few discussions about this problem:

http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=Antivirus&message.id=23281

http://community.mcafee.com/showthread.php?t=219920&highlight=tracking.log

http://www.techtalkz.com/windows-xp/31384-problems-c-system-volume-information-tracking-log.html

It is interesting that my laptop, which has the same operating system and Zone Alarm version, does not have the problem.