At the moment clamd (Packet clamav-daemon) in Debian Etch has a bug which lets it hang at some random point during it’s reload of the virus-database.
Bug #454587 — clamav-daemon: Clamav hangs checking database

So far one temporal cure is the completely purge and reinstall the clamav-packages. Also be sure to delete the directory containing the virus-database.

Another suggestion is to install clamav from [debian-volatile](http://www.debian.org/volatile/ “Debian Volatile”), but unfortunately there is no volatile for Etch and thus manually backporting is the best and cleanest solution to the problem. It works quite splendid and goes like this:

1. Add a source-line for volatile to your /etc/apt/sources.list:#

deb-src http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile sarge/volatile main contrib non-free


2. Update your apt-database

apt-get update

3. Install dependencies for building clamav-daemon:

apt-get build-dep clamav-daemon

4. Fetch the sources for clamav-daemon into a directory of your choice (I chose: /usr/src/).

apt-get source clamav-daemon

5. By now you should have a directory containing the complete clamav sources (including the sources for clamav-daemon). Change into that directory and start the whole build-process by issuing

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -rfakeroot -nc

6. As soon as the build is complete you can go one directory higher to find a whole bunch of clamav packages built from the sources, including the clamav-daemon package. You can now install the necessary packages via:

dpkg -i
7. Enjoy.

This howto is quite generic and should work for any other package you might want to backport to Etch.