crazy problems - hosts file, certain servers, and treewalk

Okay.

I merged nearly 10 hosts files... I now have over 36k entries, all unique.
I had installed treewalk DNS from www.ntcanuck.com after butting heads with XP's DNS service

Problem #1. I couldn't go to www.excessive-software.tk any other .tk domain. Hmm... after MUCH bungling around, I found that Treewalk was at fault [it queries servers that don't like the '.tk' namespace provier server]
Fix. Open Treewalk's main config file. Remove the C++ style 'double slash' comment tag from the front of 'forwaders' and change the line to read

Code:

forwarders { 4.2.2.1; 4.2.2.2; };

Problem #2. I can't see any IMVironments in yahoo messenger after I enable my hosts file. if I disable it they work fine.
Great. I've fixed this before. but only now, i'm stuck. Treewalk's DNS servers are completely nutty. They say that the IMVironment server is ACTUALLY 'unknown.level3.net'... WHAT!!!!
So I switched to my IPS's DNS. Guess what? they think that the ip of us.dl1.yimg.com is located insde their OWN ip range!!!
Then, the same ip is shown to have 2 different hostnames, and the same hostname is said to have two different ips!
But here's the crazy bit... IMVironments WORK after all this madness, ONLY if my HOSTS files is disabled!

Solution

 

Ok

here goes

Don't block these servers for Yahoo messenger's IMVironments to work.

current hosts file = ~36.6 k entries. soon to expand.