Next time try this:
1) Open a Windows Command Prompt via Start Menu, Accessories.
2)Then type the folllowing command at the prompt:
net stop dnscache
3)Then attempt the Immunize again to add the entries to hosts.
You may then either 'net start dnscache' or simply allow the next reboot to restart the DNS Caching process.
The key issue here is the overload of the Windows 2000 DNS Cache by the thousands of entries contained in the Spybot S&D hosts file additions. This will be even worse if an alternative hosts file with even more entries is also used.
The reason is that the Windows operating system was never designed to be 'stuffed' in this way with thousands of entries in hosts or Restricted Sites either for that matter. This was a great idea when there were only a few hundred sites needing to be blocked, but started to break down (with SBSD) on older (W2K) systems with limited processing power as much as two years (over a thousand additional sites) ago.
Disabling the DNS Cache really doesn't have a major negative effect, since re-reading the hosts file isn't especially worse than the issues created by trying to maintain this number of entries in the cache. However, I really question the value of such a system now that a list of several thousand entries is being maintained locally on the chance that you might either mistakenly visit or be redirected to one or more of these sites.
What I'm saying is not that the idea is 'wrong', it's just of questionable value when the entire list must be maintained on the local PC and since the updates only come weekly, it's really not dynamic enough to deal with the current 'fast-flux' botnets and other quickly changing dangerous hosts.
It seems to me that the only effective way to maintain such lists is Internet based, such as the Phishing lists from Microsoft (Internet Explorer 7), McAfee Site Advisor and others. I only use it on Windows 2000 since I can't install IE 7 and I don't wish to bother with an add-in anti-phishing application on such an old, lightly used PC.
Bitman
