We got Qhosts on one of our XP machines. This was last Friday just before MS released the patch - Got it from someones website, must have been related to the menu cuz I don't visit any other websites.
Anyway, this virus comes in through a hole in IE via ActiveX, you get by just visiting the infected web site (Very scary stuff) - This could be a very big virus soon if it's not patched quickly enough, and you heard it here first
So, to prevent any future attacks we stopped ActiveX from running and this in turn broke the menu and led us straight to the problem.
So for once, virus writers did us a favor. Doesn't excuse the fact that they should all be castrated though.
There's more info here if you're having trouble reaching Google.com, Lycos.com and many other search engines.
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/d ... hosts.html
Oh and the file to edit is c:\%WINDIR%\help\hosts and not c:\%WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts like I was trying to do, took me ages to figure that out.
Cheers
Andy