Worms were an unwanted addition to some of almost 4,000 products shipped from Creative Techology Ltd. lately, and I don’t mean the ones that live in the ground.

Creative Technology Ltd. has accidentally shipped almost 4,000 digital music players in Japan that contain a Windows worm, according to an advisory from Finnish security company F-Secure Corp.

The 5GB Zen Neeon players, which have been shipping for two months, contain the Wullik.B e-mail worm, also known as Rays.A, F-Secure said. The worm is buried in a file in the Neeon’s file system.

The worm will not infect PCs unless a user browses through the files on the player and clicks on the infected file, F-Secure said.

Creative, based in Tokyo, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The company has reported on its Web site in Japanese that the worm affects players with serial numbers between 1230528000001 and 1230533001680.

Wullik.B is more than two years old. It spreads by sending itself via e-mail and dropping itself into shared folders.

I know that most computer anti-virus software will probably be able to squash the Wullik.B pretty easily, but it is still pretty sad that something like this could happen.