Yes, I think the iPod is pretty cool, but we are talking about the more common use of the word “sick”.

Apple said yesterday that it had discovered that a some of its Video iPods shipped with a Windows virus on the player.

“Less than 1 percent” of the Video iPods sold after Sept. 12 were infected with the Windows RavMon.exe virus, Apple said.

“This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it,” Apple said in a statement on it’s web site. “So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS 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.”

Luckily it sounds like the virus shipping with some of the iPods is fairly easily to remove with common virus removal tools, according to Apple. You need to have the iPod connected your PC to have the virus scanned and removed, of course.

This is interesting, and an early preview to what is probably an increasing number of virus creators moving more into the non-Windows OS’s. Windows being such a popular OS commonly makes it the target of those creating viruses due to the number of computers that could be potentially infected. As other software continues to increase in popularity you could expect to see an increasing number of other OS’s getting infected, even though in this instance the blame seems to be put on Microsoft since the iPod virus only affects PC’s with Windows, according to Apple.