If a trojan horse virus was found and put into the vault, does it need to be deleted or left alone?

Leave it in the vault for now.





QUARANTINE FIRST, THEN DELETE LATER! (The "Vault" is what most anti-virus programs call "quarantine").





Malware removal is somewhat of an inexact science. Mistakes can and do happen. Often. False-positive detections happen more often then the anti-malware industry cares to admit. It's their dirty little secret.





Needed program files can be mistakenly flagged as malware. Quarantining allows a way to undo any incorrect file deletions, easily, if it ever becomes necessary. When the anti-virus vendor finds their mistake and corrects their signature definitions, for you, the user, it is too late. The needed file has already been permanently deleted. And then it's, "tough luck".





A file in quarantine is totally safe. It can do no harm.





You should quarantine everything for a month or so, then if all is OK with your computer and all of your programs, then you can delete.





Good luck.|||If it is in the vault then it cannot do any harm.





Nothing wrong with deleting it though.





The purpose of the vault is, for example:


Say you have a word document. It has all your important work in it. The Word document gets a virus. You don't want to completely delete it becaue all your important info will get deleted. So the virus checker put it in the vault so you can look into ways of cleaning it then getting it back to retrieve your work info.





If it is just a trojan file then feel free to delete it - you will never want that back!|||Putting it into quarantine (or the "vault") is designed to cut off the problem, so that you can look at it, and attempt to clean it, or just delete it from the system. There is nothing wrong with leaving it in the vault, but I would attempt to clean it (if its a file you need) or just delete it.





Also another virus scan once you've done the above is a good idea to make sure you have all the malware caught.