upon downloading i get "virus detected" and it fails to download after i go through regedit shennanigans to download it, i try to unzip (it is in my downloads folder) i am told it cannot be unzipped because i don't have permissions to do so the zip file then disappears from my downloads folder
what is going on?
It sounds like you need to uninstall your antivirus software.
Windows antivirus companies are essentially a scam and are worse than the protection they offer. They are more likely to mine Bitcoin (https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/7/22869528/norton-crypto-miner-security-software-reaction) or perform man-in-the-middle attacks (https://web.archive.org/web/20230614143033/https://www.thesafemac.com/avasts-man-in-the-middle/). Antivirus companies have become the bad actors they once tried but failed to stop. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/antivirus-software-1.3668746)
Regarding antivirus on Windows, as someone who has shipped a commercial Windows app that was regularly flagged by antivirus software, there is almost nothing you can do except wait. Windows antivirus companies mark your program as a virus when your .exe looks different from anything it has seen before. The reports do decrease after your .exe is shipped to thousands of computers and users manually unquarantine it. Signing the exe with Windows keys or uploading your exe to special whitelists does not work! We tried. It's just time and install base. Every update changes the exe, and antivirus software would flare up again.
The Nim team cannot fix the "virus detected" issue; the antivirus programs have made that impossible.
You can be assured that nim's installer does not have a virus. As @treeform said antiviruses often incorrectly flag less popular programs as having a "virus" quite frequently, and this happens to nim quite often.
If you have admin privileges in your machine you should be able to tell your antivirus that the nim installer does not have a virus.