Oh, Tony, you're using a broadband connection, aren't you? Do you have any idea how long it takes me to connect with my 56Kbit modem now that I have that enormous HOSTS file?

The size of the hosts file should not have any bearing whatsoever on your connection speed. All processing of the file should be happening locally before there's a communication with the modem. In fact, by preventing ad downloads, it should be speeding things up for you.

But, if you are using Windows 2000, there is a known bug in the operating system where you get slowdowns if you have more than a couple entries in your hosts file. Therefore this technique should not be used in Windows 2000. This is described on that page I linked, the page where you got the hosts file. Are you using Windows 2000?

The files at that page are out-of-date, and I wonder if anyone else has taken up the slack of maintaining a similar file?