Just thought I would warn everyone about this. Did a windows update yesterday and after the download of their montly malware remover my chillkatzip2.dll file was gone.Simply rerun the ASVE update and choose repair to fix this.JT

Hi...Ugh...First a little background.. Chilkatzip.dll is an activeX component produced by Chilkat Software. They produce many activeX components and they DO NOT have spyware in them. We use chilkatzip in AS for .zip file encryption and compression on the server side, with decryption and decompression on the client side.Some time ago (maybe about a year ago) an anti-spyware program called "Virtual Bouncer" became a problem for us. This program also uses chilkatzip.dll for zip handling.Shortly later, it was found that Virtual Bouncer while claiming to be an anti-spyware program, was actually a spy-ware program itself!The Virtual Bouncer program is now found in the reference list for pretty much all anti-spyware programs, and it will remove this "spyware" for you.Unfortunately, some anti-spyware companies did not do their homework, and they also flagged the included activeX component as spyware.About 3 months ago we reviewed 12 different anti-spyware programs and confirmed that 3 of them were flagging chilkatzip.dll falsely as spyware (associated with Virtual Bouncer) and thus they were deleting the "good" activex control used by AS and in turn broke the AS download function. We directly contacted the 3 companies, and 2 responded, fixing the problem. The 3rd did not return our e-mails. Because this 3rd anti-spyware, which unfortunately was gaining popularity amongst our users, would not fix their software, we elected to upgrade to a new version of Chilkatzip (now chilkatzip2) and re-write all our zip handling code which avoided this problem in ALL anti-spyware packages entirely (Virtual Bouncer did not use chilkatzip2, only chilkatzip). This worked great for a while.Now it appears there is a new version of Virtual Bouncer that is using chilkatzip2.dll. In addition, there are now other spyware programs that use Chilkatzip2.dll to boot. And once again the problem "false positive" has started all over again. Unfortunately we are seeing this completely valid, non-spyware activex component being flagged incorrectly in several anti-spyware programs (this happened in the past couple weeks as far as we can tell).It looks like even MS malware removal has the invalid flagging on this file as well. Very unfortunate for everyone. We did some research and found out that chilkatzip.dll / chilkatzip2.dll is used by over 4000 registered software applications that are installed on an estimated 500,000+ machines world-wide. Lots of problem reports have obviously been made... Chilkat Software has been actively contacting each one of these anti-spyware vendors on a case-by-case basis but it is apparent they are losing the battle, and are spending lots of time and money on trying to get the anti-spyware vendors to do a little more investigation before flagging such files. Not sure if their efforts are going to do any good. If we can't get a clear control that Virtual Bouncer and other spyware keeps away from, we'll have to develop our own compression/encryption routines (unfortunately this is not easy and will require lots of time and effort, taking away from other development priorities).The reality of the situtation is that many valid files are being wrongly flagged these days, and its getting worse. I am sure MS will fix their false flagging soon (hopefully) but what about the other anti-spyware packages? Talking with other developers in the same situtation as us, we see no easy solution. For now the concensus is to recommend that our customers use proven, high-quality anti-spyware from companies that actually investigate spyware flags and try not to introduce potentially valid flags into their database. Lavasoft's Ad-aware is probably the best recommended solution. We don't like suggesting to our users that they abandon their potentially paid-for anti-spyware program just to run AS, but we really don't know what else to do...In conclusion, we're terribly frustrated with this "issue" as I'm sure many of our users are. We're doing everything we can to contact these anti-spyware vendors on behalf of our users, but we only have so much time every day. We are really close to starting development of our own zip compression/encryption routines and this very well may be the only solid solution (until the next control/file gets flagged incorrectly anyways!).If you have been affected by this problem, the interim solution is to run the ASVE installer (repair option) as mentioned...Best,