First of all, let me say that I am not a novice computer user. I own a computer technician company, and this is the first problem in a long time that I have not been able to solve by searching online. That being said, here it is: I own a Dell XPS Studio 420, Win 7 Professional 64 bit, 8 gb Memory, Intel Dual Core E8500 3.16 ghz processor. Win 7 has been remarkably glitch free until this. After not being able to install an update for Microsoft Outlook, I went to troubleshoot, and realized my Hosts file had stopped being read. Symptoms: When I type IPCONFIG /displaydns, I get one of two responses. If I have just flushed the DNS cache, I get a response that says: Cannot display the dns resolver cache. If I haven't flushed it, DNS returns the websites I have just been to, instead of, as per usual, the list of websites I have re-directed to 127.0.0.1. I have checked that the file is unchanged, and it is still what I had been using, but it is no longer being used. The only evidence in the Event Viewer is an occasional message (not an error or a warning) that says 'Windows was unable to read the hosts file. Please check the permissions, etc.' What I have done to try and resolve the problem: Found the appropriate registry keys and checked that the path is correct - it is. I also checked the permissions on several of those keys - I don't know what they should be, but they look normal as far as I know. Stopped all networking-related services down to TCPIP, including TDX, NETBT, etc. and restarted them. Also started several potentially network-related services that I normally leave off, e.g. Webclient, Rasman, Rasauto, etc. Re-registered, flushed, released, renewed, etc. my connection multiple times. I have Spybot, and I had it set to block access to the HOSTS file - something that has never been an issue - but I disabled that feature so that it is no longer blocking it. I have toggled read-only attributes on the HOSTS file. I have used route print -f, to refresh my route. I have temporarily disabled IPv6 connectivity. I use Apache server, and I have temporarily disabled that. I have gone into netsh, and reset everything that allows resetting. I have uninstalled and re-installed the adapter and all networking components. Shutdown and restarted my computer. Ran SFC /scannow and used Verifier. Scanned my system for screwed up registry keys with CCleaner and Spybot. I have released names with nbtstat and cleared the arp cache. Reregistered every seemingly relevant dll that I was able to. Many of these steps were, admittedly, probably useless, but I didn't know what else to . Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

You've probably already done this but sometimes we overlook the simplest things: if you're using notepad to edit the hosts file, make sure it didn't save it with a .txt extension. You may have to turn on "Show Extensions for Known File Types" to see this. Also, since you're using 64-bit, make sure there isn't another copy of the hosts file in the "c:\windows\sysWOW64\drivers\etc" folder.

As a matter of fact, I hadn't tried either. Unfortunately, nothing. Incidentally, just fyi, there is no etc folder in syswow64\drivers folder... Anything else...I've found nothing that makes any sense, and no indication of what it could be in anything i've done.

Oddly enough, all of my Pro and Ultimate installations have an etc folder in "sysWOW64\drivers" but my Home Premium doesn't. Must've been placed there by some software I've installed (probably the FlexLM license manager used by NX and Vericut). The only other things that spring to mind is to check the permissions of your hosts file, making sure that SYSTEM has full rights; also, you might try searching your drive for any rogue copies of hosts that might have been created by other software and placed somewhere in the path. Make sure you set the search for hidden and system files.