US Patent 7266843 Malware scanning to create clean storage locations

Pre-emptive malware scanning of user specified operating system 10, 12 defined storage locations is performed to establish whether those storage locations contain any malware containing computer files. If the storage locations are malware-free, then they are classified as clean storage locations and subsequent read accesses to those storage locations will be permitted without requiring further malware scanning. Writes to clean storage locations will continue to be malware scanned.