Unknown exe files.

Im seening some sticky files in my WIN98 drive, they are exe files. I have written there details below. Can anyone tell me wht the hell are these?

m.exe Size 0 bytes attribute readonly and hidden
x.exe Size 0 bytes attribute readonly and hidden
y.exe Size 0 bytes attribute readonly and hidden
Arcldr.exe size 147 KB attribute readonly, archieve and hidden
Arcsetup.exe size 160 KB same as above
q250204.exe size 0 bytes same as above

They are not virus as my AV is not detecting any such activity. There is nothing fishy running in the background. The only problem is that i dont like these files and what the hell are they doin in my system.
Can anyone tell me?

Feel comfortable attaching them to a post?

Those sound like typical malware names. Try uploading one to one of these:
http://test-clamav.power-netz.de/
http://www.kaspersky.com/scanforvirus
http://virusscan.jotti.dhs.org/ <-- new one, I've never tried this.

I would recommend cleaning your system regardless, try running through this doc:
http://www.antionline.com/attachment...achmentid=4913

Make 100% sure that all your AV and ad removal software is updated, as well as your OS. That doc will cover it.

I have uploaded them, they didn't anything malicious about them..... My AV is Norton n i have updated its Virus Defination. But still its not detecting it as virus. Is it possible it is a spyware sort of thing. There is one more thing i found a program name ALCHEM.EXE running in the background a few weeks ago, i removed its registry, its was in startup. But after 2 days i saw it running again. Its not running in the background at the moment, but on and off after few days it usually start itself.

go here i have saved an analysis of your hijackthis log file see the reasults your self and one more thing the last entry of windows update sound suspecious to me anyway get your own analysis below
http://hijackthis.de/logfiles/fb40a1...05792fd01.html

hey why not get an online scan done at http://housecall.antivirus.com

also download ad-aware and get your system scanned, get swat-it to check for trojans

Hello there! You have some "ick" showing in your log. If you haven't done the following then please do:

Please download, update and run (one at a time of course!) Spybot Search & Destroy v1.3and Ad-aware SE v1.05 . Fix whatever they suggest.

Please download, update and run the A2 (A squared) anti-trojan. You can download it free at http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/free/ . Let it fix whatever it wants to.

Next, the current version of HijackTHis is 1.98.2. If you don't have that you can get it free at http://www.downloads.subratam.org/hijackthis.zip Once you have updated please reboot & post a fresh HijackThis log.

After you have run the above scans we can get into the manual cleaning.

:)