Originally Posted by
BigLar
Contrary to what I've been told, I did a reboot - at that time, the hosts file was read in, and now everything on the list winds up being unreachable (according to ping).
Yeah, that's because you're still running XP. Maybe if you submit a help ticket with MS, they'll fix it.
Alternatively, you could use: ipconfig /flushdns to flush the dns resolver cache.