I recommended that Hugh rename or relocate these files just to be safe. In my case, when I had Win 98 First Ed. I started by getting an occasional DNS, but over a few months I could not have an Internet session that was not 80% DNS's. The techie at my ISP, Earthlink, suggested that I rename the Host files. Immediately after doing that I was able to eliminate 100% of the DNS's. He indicated that I could safely delete them, which I did after saving copies to a Zip disk. Worked like a charm. Never had that problem again.
>> Try renaming or relocating from c:\windows Lmhost.* Do a find file for
>> host*.* I had this same problem with Win 98, and the solution for me was
>> deleting the LMhost file. Just to be safe, you should move it from its
>> current location or rename it.
>
>
> In general, I would not recommend deleting system files without
>understanding what they do.
>
> In specific, the HOSTS.SAM and LMHOSTS.SAM files included with Windows are
>SAMple files, showing what the live files HOSTS and LMHOSTS (no extensions!)
>should look like IF you need to create them. Nothing uses these sample
>files, and so deleting them cannot have any effect unless, possibly, you are
>critically short of space on your hard drive.
>
> The purpose of the live files, without extensions, is to supply mappings
>of names (host names or NetBIOS names) to IP addresses. In some cases, a
>properly-structured file may make DNS unnecessary -- this is probably never
>true if you need to talk to the Internet.
>
> There are also a few useful ticks that can be played with these files, to
>block things like spam, pop-ups, and certain kinds of spyware.
> It's certainly *possible* that there is malware out there that functions
>by deliberately creating these files with perverted contents. But I don't
>happen to know of any -- I've only ever seen a live file on machines where
>some human put one there in the attempt to fix a problem.
>
>David Gillett
>
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> Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
> with our NOSPIN Power Linux CD... at a great price!!!
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>
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