My wife asked me if I had a spare USB memory stick for her to use. I did, and when I was preparing it for her, discovered that there’s no decent free portable anti-virus application for USB flash drives.

My wife is not very computer-savvy, so what I was looking for was an app that would autorun and scan any files being transferred to/from the memory stick. The idea being to protect the memory stick and/or the host computer, particularly where the drive is used on an unprotected machine.

There are portable AV apps available out there, but they rely on manual scanning, and are mainly intended for cleaning infected machines from the flash drive, rather than protecting the flash drive from an infected machine or vice versa.

AV software vendors, how about bundling a portable “inoculation” app along these lines with your workstation products? http://amplify.com/u/a1jdyn