Norton 360 provided a scan and shows many Windows ZIP archive file corrupted

Question

Norton 360 provided a scan and shows many Windows ZIP archive file corrupted

Ruth M 0

Norton 360 provided a scan and shows many Windows ZIP archive file corrupted. This was not their normal scan in the fact that it was done at C: prompt, not in their regular window which I have never seen before. If these files need to be updated, deleted, etc. if this something that Microsoft should do or Norton ? Here are some screen shots during the scan. I am not experiencing anything other than a slowdown after the last updates which I guess was a larger problem with recent Windows updates.

Neil D 34,350 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2026-10-05T18:01:23.34+00:00

Personally I would use an antivirus program to provide virus protection and nothing else.

It may not be a actual problem.

2 answers

Your answer

Neil D 34,350 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2026-10-05T18:01:23.34+00:00

Personally I would use an antivirus program to provide virus protection and nothing else.

It may not be a actual problem.

Answer 1

Hi. I'm David, and I'm happy to help you.

Based on your description, this appears to be a classic case of third-party antivirus software attempting to decompress and read Windows archive or package files. If the compressed file is protected by system permissions, is in use during the scan, or utilizes a proprietary Windows update structure, the Norton engine cannot open it and mistakenly flags it as a corrupted archive.

This type of alert does not indicate a virus or actual operating system corruption; it is simply a failure of the antivirus scanner to read that specific compressed file.

You should never manually delete or modify these files based on such a Norton report.

To confirm whether that is indeed what happened, could you please send the screenshots you mentioned? None were included in your original question.

Click the image insertion button highlighted in the image below, click "Browse", navigate to the folder where the image is stored, and select it. Then, click the "Insert image" button to finish.

ImagemQeA

Looking forward to your reply.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Answer 2

If there are no actual Windows symptoms beyond some slowdown, those “corrupted ZIP archive” results from Norton 360 are not enough by themselves to conclude that Windows is damaged.

Two relevant points from the available guidance:

Third-party antivirus scans can report archive-related issues or performance problems during scanning, especially with CAB/ZIP-style archives. Microsoft documents that scanning archive files such as .ZIP or .CAB can degrade scan performance.
Microsoft guidance for Windows file corruption is to verify system files with System File Checker, not to manually delete Windows files based only on an antivirus archive warning.

Recommended path:

Open Command Prompt as administrator.
Run:
```
   sfc /scannow
```
Wait until verification reaches 100%.
Check the result:
- “Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.” → no missing or corrupted protected system files were found.
- “Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.” → Windows repaired them.
- “Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation.” → run the scan in safe mode and make sure %WinDir%\WinSxS\Temp contains PendingDeletes and PendingRenames.
- “Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them.” → review the SFC details and replace the affected file manually with a known good copy.

Important:

Do not delete Windows archive or system files just because Norton flagged them during that scan.
If the issue is only scan-time slowdown, archive scanning itself can contribute to that.
If Norton was run from a command-line style scan at C: rather than its normal UI, that does not by itself mean Microsoft needs to update or remove files.

Based on the available information, Windows should handle repair of protected system files through SFC. Norton is responsible only for its scan results and behavior; it should not be used as the basis for manually removing Windows files.