If some "would-be expert" tells you that a virus can be present in the memory without being present somewhere else (on the hard disk, diskette or any other medium of a similar type), contact somebody else. The safety of your data will be much greater.
A virus may be present in the memory and not active at the same time. Imagine the situation that you are copying the infected file from a diskette to a diskette. Also in this case you use the operation memory of the computer and both source and target files are stored in it. It means that the virus can exist in the memory even after finishing the copying operation, simply because there is no reason for cleaning the memory used in the above described way. However, it does not mean that the virus in this form can cause any kind of harm.
At the same time you cannot remove a virus from your computer at the moment when it is present in the operation memory and it is active. The reason is very simple: the virus immediately attacks each program or disk system area which you try to treat. You can do nothing about that. It applies generally that you cannot eliminate a virus in the memory at the time when it is present in it. Of course, there can be some exceptions, but you cannot rely on it.
At the same time we must point out that there are not many viruses developed exclusively for the operating systems Windows 95 and NT and that memory resident viruses are usually viruses the designed for the MS-DOS system, which entered the memory at the start-up of the computer or during the work in the DOS window. If it is at the same time a virus that attacks disk system areas, you can directly move to the chapter dedicated to the viruses of this type. As far as the viruses infecting files are concerned, the solution how to remove the virus from the memory is not complicated.
Boot the system from a system diskette. In fact you may use an arbitrary system diskette from MS-DOS 5.0 and higher. Nevertheless, we recommend you to use a system diskette for the system which you have installed in your computer.
Continue the work depending on the type of virus.
Under the operating system Windows NT there are practically no problems with viruses in the memory. The only viruses that can disturb you this way are the viruses attacking disk system areas.