AVG False Positive?

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I have a number of protected forms (about 50) that were created with Word 6. If I select all of them & run AVG, they show no virus. If I attempt to open any of them (whether by double clicking or within Word), I get a message that a virus is found. None of them contain macros. I’ve opened a number of them anyhow. If I make any change whatsoever & close the file, I can reopen it without any message. Furthermore, AVG doesn’t find any viruses on it’s daily scan.

I’ve written to Griswold support & they can’t help unless I send the file. I can’t because these are all confidential & as soon as I make a change, the “virus” is gone. Has anyone seen anything like this?
Thanks,

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A lot of times, these are false positives… particularly if the AV software can’t name a specific species of malware, it could be overaggressive “heuristics” that are suspicious of certain WordBasic commands.

Added: Oh, wait, no macros. Maybe it’s something about the template? (Or are these templates?)

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Hi Jefferson:
These aren’t templates, they are protected forms, but that gave me an idea. I checked the attached template. They all list an old template (which also doesn’t have macros). However, the path to the template has changed, but Tools/Templates & add-ins… still lists the old incorrect path, whether or not I make changes to the underlying document & save it. I thought that it would revert to the normal.dot template if the path were wrrong, so I’ll check into that. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the virus message, though. Perhaps it is the heuristics that causes the problem, although I don’t know why it would do that when I try to open the file, but not when otherwise scanning. All these files are password protected to open with an older (weak) encryption according to the security options… I’m not sure if that has anything to do with it.

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