after this morning's windows auto update, all my firefox versions (1.08, 1.5, 2.0) started ignoring dns-ip entries in my windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, i do testing that requires switching servers through the hosts file, this was a blocker and was a real mystery! part of it is that windows IE is not affected, it goes with the entries in the hosts file, also ping command behave properly. did ipconfig /flushdns, no help. asked IT guys, they created a ticket and thats it! searched the net ("firefox hosts" on Y! search), found there were cases similar but were related to proxy settings, i am directly connected to the net without proxy, hmmm,

after hours of searching, opened up windows services, located DNS Client and stopped it. then FF started to work with hosts entries! started DNS Client, FF did not following hosts file again, what the ***********!

why DNS Client runs on my pc?