[raybbr]

You opened the file with Notepad, right ? It is not the filename itself that has a # in front of it. It is the lines in the text file.

Yep. It only has one line "127.0.0.1" in it. No number symbols or anything else.

Ran SuperAntiSpyware and it came up with a couple of things - cleaned - still the same.

Am now running Microsoft Security Scanner. We'll see what that finds.

[Kellis91789]

Well, I still don’t see this file as being the problem, although it is odd that it is empty. XP Pro ships with the file’s contents as I put in my post. I’d guess whatever bug you’ve got cleared the file so you couldn’t shortstop it. Or one of the tools you’ve already tried cleared the file as a precaution.

It doesn’t NEED to have anything in it. It exists only to provide shortcuts to url’s so your PC doesn’t need to lookup the IP address for a url on a DNS server somewhere. Putting “wrong” entries in it is useful to prevent popups and other content on webpages from finding the correct address on a DNS — a bad address means that popup or whatever fails to run, which is exactly what you want sometimes.