I've got an odd situation where I'm emptying out my hosts file but when I ping something that used to have an entry in the hosts file the hosts file gets populated with the entries that I've just removed.
The entries are particular to various servers on the network so they're not just random IP addresses. However, since some of the IP addresses have been changed, so the entries are no longer valid, but I can't just remove them and rely on the internal DNS on the network.
What could be updating the hosts file?
Edit: So it seems that running ipconfig /flushdns
is what's adding the entries back in. I've not come across this before.
Edit2: should have pointed out earlier, this is on a windows box
Edit3: It looks like it's svchost.exe that's doing it. See this here screenshot: