Microsoft Safety Scanner counts bad files but ends up saying "no problems found"

Question

I'm running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 on my Surface Pro 7+. Last night, I ran Microsoft Safety Scanner (1.455.279.0) which takes many hours to run. While running, it displays how many files it has scanned, how many bad files it's found, and a handful of other things. After it had run around 3 hours, it was reporting 8 bad files found. An hour or two later, it was something like 14. Then I went to sleep.

The scan completed some time during the day today, and tonight when I checked, the "Scan results" were displayed. Weirdly, it says "The scan completed successfully and no viruses, spyware, and other potentially unwanted software were detected." (Below is a screengrab.)

If there were no viruses, spyware, etc., what were the bad files that it was counting? What are their names & paths, and what am I supposed to do about them?

Answer 1

The Microsoft Safety Scanner Tool works in a different way to most anti-virus software, during the scan it marks files that may contain malware, then, at the end of the scan those files are tested against the malware database, if none are found to actually contain malware, then it will report no malware was found on your PC, that indicates your system is malware free, there is nothing further you need to do.