Hosts file in Windows XP? Modified now IE7 doesnt work right?

Fairly technical person here - but, I edited the HOSTS file in my XP home and pro computer to avoid ad serving and hitting rogue websites. For the most part, it works - HOWEVER - when I visit some sites, when the site loads the portion (referenced in the HOST file - such as an %26lt;IFRAME%26gt; which has a banner ad) - the entire page redirects and you do not get the page content but a search page instead.

It's almost like the page discovers you thwarted the banner ad from being served and it makes the page unviewable. THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN W/ FIREFOX - but, with FFox the ads do not get served, so the function is happening properly. I do not know with IE6 because I upgraded my 3 computers all to IE7. Some sites which are problematic are: aimpages.com or (sorry Yahoo!): my.yahoo.com (most of the time, but not all the time w/ the top banner load).

Anyone know how to turn this redirect off from the ad not being served? (And, changing page redirects or IE security, etc makes no difference).

Hosts file in Windows XP? Modified now IE7 doesnt work right?windows vista

there is no guarantee from Windows that your hosts file will do anything predictable except for lan stuff....I read this on a popular website (don't remember which one)...basically it uses it sometimes for some things, and ignores it other times...I put this line in my hosts:

0.0.0.0 google.com

or something like that, and it did absolutely nothing...not unix-y at all...anyway, sorry this doesn't help, but just a heads up that it might not be you or IE doing this...