hmmm i need some help with this one people ... my university network is probably the worst place in the world to connect your USB drive cuz of the number of viruses ...

do you know any good real time scanners that can be installed on the USB (pref. Free) ... i know sandisk has come out with a usb drive that scans based on mcafee ... but for one sandisk drives aren't available here and secondly mcafee is one of the worst antiviruses i've ever dealt with ...

any/all input is appreciated ...

You wanna install antivirus on a USB? Because the university PC does not have antivirus installed?

If the PC is already compromised, using the antivirus copy on your USB drive does not help in anyway; it will even infect that virus scanner as well.

If the university PC does not have antivirus, and you want to scan something before copy to your USB drive then best to use online virus scanner.

there is an antivirus there problem is the 2 they use are norton and nod32 ... both of which are entirely ridiculous and personally i find useless ...

problem isn't the files being transferred that are infected ... the problem is that almost as soon as you connect a USB to the system about 5 different trojans/viruses come on it automatically ...

the best antivirus i've ever used is avast cuz it pretty much wipes EVERYTHING clean ... including rubbish nod32/mcafee/norton/kaspersky leave behind ... (an avast scan on systems running these antiviruses previously resulted in 100+ infected files, each) ...

the issue isn't that my home pc might be compromised .. issue is each time i connect the usb to the uni system, bring it home, and then clean it. i have to remove the data and put it back there for the USB to work normally ..

what happens is that when you double click the damn thing in my computer it tries to open the drive as a unrecognized file ... until you've formatted .. even after the virus is gone ...

wish i had the name for the virus so i could clean it out but unfortunately all i turn up is trojan/win32 ... though it is behaving more like a worm then a virus ...

Umm... if the university PCs are infected with virus, putting a virus scanner on the USB drive does not help you in anyway.

The viruses on the university PC will eat away the antivirus program you put on your USB drive the moment you plug it in, so how does it gonna help you?

Also, you post is confusing... first you said that the University PC uses Norton and NOD32 which you said are entirely useless; yet later you said that the best antivirus you ever used is Norton???

Are you drunk or something?

Edited and corrected:

Best used has been avast

Get a hardware write-protected flash drive. The one with a sliding lock to disable any writing to it. If the compromised system is running a rootkit, it has more privileges than you do, no kung-fu will protect your drive if you enable the machine to write on it. But i guess these flash jumpers are just vanilla drive autorun pests that dont get past your home scanner. If you ever need an executable from the infected machine, you're out of luck, chances are, since that pc is running all kinds of desease, there's one your scanner hasn't heard of yet. You can't clean a uni machine unless you boot it from a flash drive with linux or windowsPE that has up to date antivirus on it, and i doubt you have that kind of access to it, unless you're the admin :)

Find a clean PC, make a bootable flash, something like BartPE with nod32 or avast plugin for portable scanner, boot your pc from flash, scan away... other options for bootable CDs and flash drives are Linux distros but havent used those and can't recommend any

That's too much trouble and is not cheap... as I've said... using online virus scanner is the best.

Your USB drive should contains junks only (or stuffs not important that you can format/delete anytime). If you need to copy some files at school's computer, throw them to an online virus scanner; if it's clean, copy it to your USB drive.

Disclaimer: This is as safe as using a condom in sex. It is only 97% effective; the rest of the time, a smart virus (or sperm in the case of condoms) can break through.