I am almost pretty sure it happens when any AV puts an executable in quarantine and you release it. It happened again with an executable quarantined in the destination usb drive by Panda Antivirus. It had its date updated for the time when it was scanned by the AV. I guess all AV programs do this then.
I am still investigating though.
PS - That was on a Windows 7 machine, just to clarify.
Is the executable part of a regular program or stand alone app? I have one old game title VIPRE loves to see the main exe file locked up repeatedly despite adding it to the exceptions list. Never saw any time stamp change however.
In fact I checked it now and it shows August 10, 2015 when I saw the clean install replace the pooched upgrade I ran with for the first week. For some reason the newer 2016 beta as well as the 2015 versions saw it as a bug while the 2014 never saw that come up.
While I suspect restoring something might be the av program simply copying it back to the drive I doubt you see numerous files each with their own time stamp changed thar were never locked up but possibly being backed up and restored in some manner. If the av program should happen to modify not copy particular files that would account for some seeing this. In years past AVG would clean files that got buggy back in the XP days however.
I think I have may nailed it down to those antimalware software that uses AutoIT.
I figured it would end up being a 3rd party source you would need to track down. If it was simply a Windows bug nothing would work right! The system processes would be all over the place!
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