I'm reawakening this thread to say, that, I believe Spybot team should make Spybot S&D support such type of HOSTS file.

That way, to a certain point, will also be possible to have DNS Client enabled, if we use other hosts file as well, and make user of tools to maintain the HOSTS file.

I make use of Hostsman, and version 4 will already support such. It will convert normal HOSTS file to an optimized HOSTS file. It is possible to do it, already, with a tool that the same creator of Hostman, offers - http://forum.abelhadigital.com/index.php?showtopic=637

hpHosts already offers an optimized version of their HOSTS file, converted by Hostsman 4.

Spybot should support such format, otherwise it will just crash.