LILO & BIOS AV Protection

Before the installation of Red Hat Linux 6.1 I disabled BIOS antivirus protection. After installation was complete, I enabled it back again and when tried to reboot I received a warning from BIOS AV about boot virus. I suspected that LILO might couse that problem, so disabled protection, boot to Win 98 and ran my AV software. No virus was found, so I just left the protection disabled.
The question is – should it be this way, or I may have a real virus threat?