Most anti-virus programs has a Heuristic scanning engine and it mean that apart from scanning for known virus/trojan signatures it also scan for "suspicious" code fragments that reminds of or are similar to known viruses. Sometimes this technique finds real viruses but quite often it also generate a "false positive" and there can be several reasons for this, apart from a too aggressive setting.

In the case with Astrocalc, which also often is the case with false positives, it's triggered by cryptographic code that the program contains. This code is a part of the programs protection system and is there to prevent that the program is tampered with in the first place and in fact, if a virus or trojan infection would occur the program would crash immediately and refuses to run at all!

Sometimes virus makers also "protect" their viruses with such cryptographic code which makes it extra hard for the antivirus program and most of the free antivirus programs takes a lazy route and simply flag all such entities as containing a "generic trojan or virus", just to be on the sure side and when complaining they simply refer to their non free version ;-)

Bottom line, you can be absolutely sure that no virus or trojan is shipped with any Astrocalc software and if that still would happen we would announce the incident immediately. The risk that would happen though is slim to almost non as I run a very tight system here and would be the first to notice if something was wrong.

Joakim Schramm
Astrocalc Software