US company Sunbelt Software is set to become one of the first anti-virus vendors to embrace a promising but as yet little-used new technique for malware detection known as ‘file emulation’. Released this week to UK users after a US launch some time ago, the company’s Vipre Enterprise anti-malware client is on the face of it just another program jostling for attention with the admin-friendly claim that it can protect PCs from malware without slaughtering performance. Known in company jargon as ‘MX-Virtualization’ (MX-V), Vipre effectively creates an emulated Windows PC in a sandbagged area of memory, mimicking API functions such as the Windows registry, file system, and communications interfaces to see what a file is trying to do.