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The RavMonE.exe worm found its way onto the iPods' hard drives while the players were being assembled by one of Apple's contracted manufacturers. Apple said that less than one per cent of the iPods sold after 12 September contain the infection.

In a statement on its website's support pages, Apple said that it has seen fewer than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS

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X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free.

'As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it,' the statement says.

Apple explained that the worm has somehow been transferred to a machine used for iPod quality control and that it had made made changes to ensure that no future iPods are affected.

The virus can easily be removed provided up-to-date anti-virus software is installed. As the virus propagates via mass storage devices, any mass storage devices that have recently been attached to a PC - including external hard drives, digital cameras with removable media and USB flash drives - should also be scanned.

Once drives have been scanned, iTunes 7 should be used to restore the iPod software. Mac users who also use their iPod with a Windows machine should also restore the iPod software.

The news comes hard on the heels of a similar incident in Japan, where McDonalds' MP3 player giveaways were also found to be infected with a Windows virus.