IP Alias issues

Hi, I'm having trouble using IP aliases in windows explorer (Windows 2000) and its driving me crazy! here's the problem: I have entries in my hosts file which list an ip address and then multiple aliases in the same line. I can ping any alias I give this machine and it returns fine. However, when I try to use the aliases as part of a path in windows explorer I can only use the alias that exacty matches the machine name. Any other alias I assign and try to use in explorer return the error "A duplicate name exists on the network". This is definatley not the case because I've named it things like "sausage" and "sellotape" and I'm pretty sure no-one is using those! I thought that the point of aliases was that you could choose a conveniant naming convention, I'm thinking that there may be some sort of security setting or access issue on the destination machine that could cause this.
Does anyone have any ideas as to why this doesn't work? thanks in advance.