Which of the following items of a computer system will an anti-virus program scan for viruses?

The boot sector - including the Master Boot Record and Volume Boot Record - is one of the first locations antivirus software examines because viruses embedded there execute before the operating system, making them highly persistent and difficult to remove. Antivirus tools include dedicated routines to read and analyze this region for malicious code signatures. Detecting boot sector infections early is critical because they can undermine all OS-level security controls.

Deleted files are largely inaccessible to antivirus scanners because their content may be partially overwritten and their file system metadata has been removed.

The Windows Process List reflects processes already running in memory; while antivirus tools use behavioral monitoring of processes, this is not a static storage location that is 'scanned' for virus files.

Password-protected or encrypted files cannot be scanned by antivirus programs because the content is unreadable without the decryption key, so they are typically skipped.