Was the w98 machine going thru the same proxy?

Oh, and I forgot:

Bitt, You da man.

Woo-hoo!

Was the w98 machine going thru the same proxy?

Negative, the Win98 box is my home machine, and it does not point to a proxy server. So I can do the hostsfile trick locally on that box.

Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0 on Windows NT 4.0.
...It's not our only firewall, it's actually a second stage firewall...

A proxy/junk tangent here....

I had a blocking 127.0.0.1 host file for a while, but didn't like the ungraceful "X not found" side effects. Maybe there was a way to fix that, but instead I took another whack at setting up Squid and the "Internet Junkbuster" (recently renamed on Sourceforge to Privoxy ).

The combination seems to work pretty well. I have it set up as:

Browser-->Squid-->Privoxy-->Internet

That's what the Privoxy folks recommend and it keeps Squid from caching junk (see the sample in the Privoxy config file).

I have both of these running on my Linux file server so that they can serve multiple clients, but it looks like it would be possible to compile both for Windows and run them locally (allowing enough resources/memory). It also occured to me (and the reason I post) that it would be possible to run Privoxy on the same box with MS Proxy Server in the same way as you'd run it with Squid -- set up a few simple forwarding configurations.

Privoxy just substitutes generic checkerboard placeholder graphics where all those Doubleclick banners would be, and Squid really speeds up repeat loads of my frequently visited site (like empeg.comms.net).

For anyone who has run Junkbuster off of distributions like Redhat, it's likely that those versions are way out of date (Redhat's certainly is).