Hi Larry Keenan,
 BO>> it seems impossible that after unzipping something you get a
 BO>> virus.. but it is not impossible to get a boot sector virus from
 LK> It is not impossible to get a virus simply by unzipping something. You
 LK> can also activate a virus by copying a file. Some boot sector files
 It is possible to activate a virus by simply unzipping an archive or copying 
a file, if you use word 'activation' in the following sense: There is a virus 
in memory which is waiting for some particular action after which it will do 
some nasty things (like writing a message or formatting hd) and when this 
happens it 'activates'; but I did not mean activation of an existing virus, I 
was talking about a new infection.
 It is also possible to get a virus after running a self extracting archive, 
but using a clean unziping program to unzip an archive can never end up with 
a new infection because the virus code must be run (or dropped by some other 
running program) and only the unarchiver's code (which is clean by 
definition) is run.
 if unarchiver's code is not clean, the problem is not 'unzipping something', 
rather it is 'running an infected program'.
                                                Berk
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