Trojan Found and Removed, but is it really gone?

[Pencheven]

Hi guys

After unzipping a file using WinRAR a not so technical friend of mine is going crazy that his AVG (free version) found a Trojan .exe file in the unzipped folder. He says he deleted the zip file, folder, and used AVG to delete the Trojan which was sent to the vault. After having deleted everything he did a full scan and nothing was found.

He says he never actually opened any .exe file, but just opened the folder that was unzipped, which then I presume was automatically scanned by AVG and detected.

Is there any way this file could still be active / infected?

The reason I ask is that I have had this before where a file was detected within a folder and deleted, but I didn’t actually open the file. It was deleted and nothing was found after, so I thought nothing more of it.

As in does a Trojan infected .exe need to be run in order to be a problem such that only scanning it and deleting it renders it harmless?

Thanks in advance.