The application incorrectly identified a Windows system file as Trojan

Mar 15, 2013 07:40 GMT  ·  By

The popular AVG Anti-Virus software incorrectly flagged a vital Windows system file as Trojan horse, causing a failed boot in case the user opted to remove the “infection.”

According to an official post by the company, the anti-virus application identified the wintrust.dll Windows system file as Generic32.FJU Trojan horse, asking the user to either clean the infection or remove it completely.

Since it’s a critical system file, cleaning it fails in most cases, so some users decided to remove it. That blocks the boot of the Windows operating system after the first reboot, a few affected consumers confirmed.

AVG responded promptly and issued a new virus definition update to fix the problem detected in AVG Anti-virus 9 and 2012 editions running on Windows XP.

Users who have already removed the file are recommended to boot Windows XP with the Rescue CD in order to copy the original wintrust.dll file back to the system32 folder.