CYBERSPACE — For years critics of Microsoft products have joked that the company’s Operating System qualifies as a virus that needs to be quarantined and removed. For a brief time, the Kaspersky’s Lab antivirus program agreed. It was just before Christmas and only lasted two hours, according to Kaspersky representatives.

It was the Windows Explorer, an important part of the Microsoft OS, that actually found itself temporarily blacklisted. The culprit, according to Kaspersky Lab, is a virus called Huhk-C, which had squirreled itself away inside of the explorer.exe file. When the company’s antiviral software uncovered the mal-content, it went above and beyond the call of duty to not only sequester the virus, but also the entire file system’s graphical user interface. In some cases, the system wasn’t merely quarantined, it was deleted.

What this meant for the unwitting few users affected by the mistake was that their system suddenly had even more problems then usual accomplishing simple tasks, including locating files.

According to ZDNet Australia, the company is evaluating what went wrong in order to figure out why the error “slipped through the net.”

“This is classic false alarm territory,” senior technology consultant David Emm observed to ZDNet Australia. “We will check through our systems and see if we can tighten them up so we don’t run into this problem in the future. No antivirus company, including ourselves, can say they have never had a false alarm; on all fronts we do what we can to minimize any potential risk to our customers.”

Although Emm acknowledges that the “offending signature” was circulated approximately 7:00pm on Wednesday the 19th, he points out that it was revoked two hours later in an attempt to limit the damage the over correction might have caused to users.

“We proactively went out to our enterprise customers to make them aware there was this potential issue,” he explained. “Only one corporate customer [in the UK] encountered this problem, as well as a handful of home users.”

Users who had left their computer’s default settings intact had their explorer.exe quarantined, while those who had adjusted theirs experienced full deletion. Kaspersky had previously criticized OneCare, Microsoft’s own antivirus program, pointing out that it tends to quarantine or even delete Microsoft Outlook files.