XP cannot resolve against hosts file...

A WinXP SP3 system refuses to resolve any entries in the hosts file. No errors on privs are encountered when we open, alter, and save the file. I've never seen this happen before. If we assume that the hosts file is the first in the search-order in the registry, and the file-privs are OK, What things should I check / what things have people seen before that cause this to happen?

A application on this box needs to resolve a hostname, and we can't put it in DNS...

 

The 'application' is actually a cleint for a patch-management agent (Dell makes a product called KACE) (An acquisition....) The agent needs to resolve a hostname, "patchserver.company.com" It needs an FQDN, because it's using SSL. So, we put it in the host file, but when we ping "patchserver.company.com ", it can't resolve it to an IP. There are 10 other systems like this one, and they all work fine except this one.

Can't use proxy -- the KACe client can't be configured to do so - it has to sends packets direct. In my 12 years in the business, putting something in the hosts file always makes it resolvable -- immediatly....

 

Copy the hosts file from a working computer to this computer & see if everything checks out.