Hanging in Welcomescreen

[LTN-byte]

Hello
My Win 11 hangs in "Welcome"-loadingscreen when i copy your hosts file and after a restart or the normal "end of day" shutdown, and when i then restart it on next day this happens.

If i then go into CMD with a win-bootstick and delete with CMD comands the hosts file everything is normal.

So what solution do you have? i cant use your hosts file because then my pc isnt usable...

thank you very much!

[welcome]

Hello! Thank you for opening your first issue in this repo. It’s people like you who make these host files better!

[Lateralus138]

The Windows DNS Cache service has trouble parsing large HOSTS files with lots of entries and can make many parts of the Windows OS hang. You have 2 main options (disable DNS Cache service or compress the HOSTS file):

1. Disable the DNS Cache (which I do not recommend) via the registry entry directly or edit the registry via an Administrative command line.

• Registry directly: Open your chosen registry editor (default is regedit.exe via command line or search via your Start Menu) and search for the path HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Dnscache, locate the 'Start' entry and change the value from 2 to 4 (back to 2 if you want to reenable the service).
• Registry command line: Run REG add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Dnscache" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f in an Administrative command line.

This option is more than likely also in the menu of the Services application, but more than likely it is grayed out and not editable.

Disabling the cache service can mess things up, the main example being WSL and therefore, as stated above, I do no recommend. Though, of course, that is your prerogative.

or

2. You can compress the HOSTS file with either a script or compiled program, both of which you can find in the README of Steven's repo (2 of which are my tools). I recommend my program as it is way faster or one of the various scripts, but that's your choice.

• Compress the HOSTS file with my tool, delete the original (after a backup copy is made if you like), flush the DNS cache, and replace the original file with the new one. My tool and instructions on how to use it can be found at my repository here: https://github.com/Lateralus138/hosts-compress-windows
• Compress the HOSTS file with my PowerShell script, same as above just using the script instead found here: https://github.com/Lateralus138/hosts-compression-scripts

If you need help with the whole process there are more in depth instructions at my scripts repository so you can grab my main program and then go to the scripts repo and use the same instructions just replacing the script with the tool part.

There's also a Python script somewhere for compression, but I'm not sure where nor am I familiar with it.

After compressing the HOSTS file everything should run very smoothly and fast and you'll still be able to utilize the DNS Cache service.

I hope this helps.

[broken-software]

There is similar discussion here at #2138.
For Windows, you can follow above recommendation. There isn't much Steven can do here.