The one part that is missing in running a scan of a computer with Kaspersky Antivirus is the ability to define scans that skip certain folders.

I always copy the i-386 folder from the Windows installation CD to the hard drive of any computer that I set up. Apparently, because the compressed files in that folder are difficult to scan, Kaspersky requires about 5 hours to scan that one folder on a 3 Ghz, hyper-threaded Pentium 4. Since the files in that folder are never infected and are almost never used, there is just no reason to scan it with every hard drive scan. The real time protection is adequate if the files do get used in the future.

Hello
KAv 6 offers this posibility.
Just go to the scan menu select something and right click "scan", select save as:
Click to view attachment
Afterwards just add/delete things you want to scan/not to scan
Click to view attachment

If you just want to exclude a folder for scanning go to settings->trusted zone->exclusion mask
define the folder, check to include subfolders and select it for any task:
Click to view attachment

Lucianbara,

Thank you very much for your help. I just tested this and here's what I see.

This is a horribly non-intuitive way to exclude objects from scans. The add/remove feature would require you to add every single folder on a drive individually, since there is no way to add a drive and then exclude a single folder.

So far I can't find the exclusion mask option, but I'll continue hunting for that.

The truth is, I'm used to Symantec where it's much easier and more intuitive to create custom scans. I know the virus scanning isn't as good, but the user interface is better. I'm obviously new to Kaspersky and perhaps I won't feel that way once I get more practice with it. But I could instantly see how to create custom scans the first time I ever ran Symantec, and it took a post on a support forum for me to find out how to do it in Kaspersky.

Here is where to find the exclusion mask. Just click add and you will get a window similar to what posted:

I know this is a "suggestions" and not a user help forum, but I wantd to point out that the current method of excluding folders from being scanned does not work reliably.

I was trying to determine hoe effective Symantec is as compared to Kaspersky in catching spyware and viruses. I picked a network user who historically has had spyware and virus problems because he spends too much of his time surfing off-the-wall web sites. I scanned his computer with Symantec (which is installed on it) and it scanned clean.

In order to see if Kaspersky would find any additional dangerous files, I mapped his C: drive as Z: on a computer with Kaspersky installed (I can do that since his computer is a domain member and I'm an administrator). I excluded "Z:\i386" from the areas to be scanned. But the i386 folder is being scanned on the mapped network drive, even though it is excluded. I exited and restarted Kaspersky and tried again with the same result.

I'm not certain if the exclusion process only fails to work on mapped drives, but it needs some work in any case.

Hello,

please try to exclude "Z:\i386\*". As far as I know your current exclusion mask excludes the file "i386".

Nope, that doesn't work either. It still tries to scan the Z:\i386 folder.

Additional information:

Almost all of the files in the i386 folder end with the underline character. So a file that uncompresses to SYS.DLL will be stored as SYS.DL_. I excluded *.*_ without a location and that allso made no difference. Kaspersky is still attempting to scan files that end with the underline character and going VERY slowly.

This brings up another point. Could something be done to speed up the scanning of compressed files?

Did you select "Scan" as a task, the exclusion is supposed to be applied to?

In case scanning of archives is too slow for you, you can try to limit the scanning of them in the settings of the scan.

I just found the solution. I changed the task to "any" from the default of file antivirus.

But this brings up another suggestion. Why is file antivirus the defaut? Since there is no way to change this under the scan settings, wouldn't it make more sense to have "any" as the default and then allow the user to limit it or make it available as an option under each protection process with that process shown as the defaut?

When you make "any" default, some users will leave it unintentionally, because they don't know what this setting is for, or because they forget to change it. This would lead to exclude the specified objects completely from the control of KAV/KIS.
I think the option "File-Anti-Virus" is also the option most users want to choose.

This may be a bit off topic but I'm surprised it takes you 5hours to scan the 'i-386' folder! I did the same thing as you-that is copy that folder to my hard disk. But KIS takes around 1h 20min. to scan my whole 40GB hard disk. No. scan only changed files is not selected and neither is iChecker or iSwift. And my processor is 1.6 Ghz, ram is only 256mb. I think something might be wrong with your computer.

I've read through this thread.

Suggestion: allow KAV (Kaspersky AntiVirus) to scan individual single folders and scan individual files.

RL

you can do it, either by right click on the folder->scan for viruses or under scan->add and select the file/folder