Question about WinXP host file

I'm looking at a host file on a friend's PC and it's got at least 50 entries. They all have the loopback 127.0.0.1 IP (which is normal I guess), but the sites associated are 99.9% marketing (casalemedia, trafficbucks, etc) or porno (teenybods, sex-pics.com, etc) or random strings (yzxwwhgddyrw.biz- there's only 4 or 5 of these). The all have a comment that says 'Insterted by StopZilla'. It seems to me that they should ALL be deleted except the one that says local host. What does the host file do? Why is StopZilla filling it w/ crap-ola? How do I clean the host file- just open in NotePad and start erasing lines of text? Any help will be appreciated!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

hopperdave2000

 

Yes you can delete it but what its doing is forcing any requests to those pages to redirect to localhost, to prevent popups or those sites from coming up, its a common policy to do this. Check out this article for more info. If you do decide to remove the stuff, yes just open in notepad and remove the lines. Imho though i would leave it, as its not doing any harm, and stopzilla may just readd it if he continues to use it. Not sure about stopzilla, haven't used/heard of it.

 

Thanx for the info. If it's doing no harm, I'll leave it alone. I thought that maybe they were hijack attempts of some type. Thanx again!

hopperdave2000

BTW- StopZilla is a firewall/antivirus/antispyware type of tool similar to Arovax Shield... it doesn't really scan or remove anything but it provides real-time protection.....