I recently switched to WinME and am having a minor problem that I can’t figure out on my own:
I use a utility that’s pop-up filter (among other things) called The Proxomitron. It’s a proxy server that filters out all sorts of crap and is completely user configurable. It’s one of my favorite apps.
However, I’m getting a behavior from it that I never got in Win98:
When I first boot up, once everything’s loaded (including the Proxomitron, which is in my startup sequence) and HDD activity ceases,if I open Internet Explorer right away, it takes 2-3 minutes for Internet Explorer to find the Proxomitron. To use it, you have to set your broswer to use a proxy server and set the proxy address to “localhost” and the port to “8080”. IE will sit there for a couple of minutes, “Trying to find site localhost”.
I’ve tried checking and unchecking the “Bypass proxy for local addresses” button: makes no difference.
You’ll need to add an entry for localhost in your hosts file. Different versions of Windows put this file in different places; some quick Googling leads me to believe that WinME keeps it in the C:\Windows directory (or whatever your Windows installation path is), but I’m not quite sure about that - it may be C:\Windows\System32. (Often there’s a “sample” hosts file in the appropriate directory, named something like hosts.sam.)
Anyway, add the following entry to the hosts file (using Notepad or some other plain-text editor):
127.0.0.1 localhost
This will allow Windows to look the name up locally, which should speed things up.
I just looked though, and that entry is already there, although there were about 12 spaces between the IP address and the host name (which I trimmed down to one space).
Is the “Automatically Detect Proxy Server” button unchecked? It’s above where you put in the proxy server for Proxomitron. It shouldn’t make too great of a difference, since it says it’s trying to find “localhost” already. Just a random thought. I’ll post again if I think of a good answer
Latch: I’ve tried it both ways, makes no difference.
What’s weird is this is almost certainly a WinME issue: I’ve installed Proxomitron on a number of Win98 (original and second ed) boxes, my dad’s Win2k box, and my brother’s WinXP machine and none of 'em have experienced this problem.
If it is currently named hosts.sam or hosts.txt or hosts.<anything>, it will not work. If you used notepad to edit it, it may have been renamed with a .txt extension. Normally, the sample file does not have an extension, but you may want to double check that.
You can verify that the hosts file is functioning properly by going to a command prompt (this may still be called a dos prompt in ME) and typing:
Ping localhost
it should respond with:
Pinging <your computername> [127.0.0.1] with 32 bytes of data.
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=<10ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=<10ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=<10ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time=<10ms TTL=128
It may time out if you have a firewall blocking ICMP, but the important line is the first one, that indicates localhost was properly resolved to 127.0.0.1
One other thing I’d recommend for a test is to remove the program from start up, and then starting it manually after Windows has loaded. If that has no issues, it is possible Proxomitron is interfering with ME’s IP stack load, causing your delay.
