HOSTS file ignored by IE6!!!

[KennyR]

It's not up to IE, it's just a browser. It's up to the TCP/IP stack.

Try http://mike-xp

that should do it. Without the http:// prefix, IE thinks that "mike-xp" is a path on your hard drive, since it's wired to work on your local path too (dumb Microsoft browser and desktop manager integration, bah). But numbers will usually be used as IPs.