windows 8 DNS Client Service oddity, or how to prevent IE10 from hanging in other Metro apps

[News Bot]

Hi - this is sort of two questions and an answer in one post. Answer first for those who don't want to read the technical stuff:DNS Client Service needs to be at least in a manual (not disabled) setting to indirectly launch a url in Metro IE in a reasonable amount of time due to what a appears to be a near-infinite loop.

Technical stuff:

I did the in-place upgrade from Windows 7 a couple weeks ago, and there were a few hiccups - but most were pretty common and I found a solution to pretty easily (Windows Store and others requiring Windows Firewall service, wiping the windows update history folder so built-in metro apps could update etc.).

However, I had a very odd issue that hours of searching didn't find: Internet Explorer worked fine in all aspects in "desktop mode", and when launched directly in Metro. The problem came when using another metro app such as bing search that opens a URL from an app. It would take literally an entire minute every time - even if IE is already open. Sometimes IE wouldn't launch at all. For example, in Bing Search you could search for something OK, but click on a tile - or multiple! - and nothing "appears" to happen.

Event Viewer did document it as an "Application Hang" with binary data as follows:

-----

In Words

0000: 006E0055 006E006B 0077006F 0000006E

0008: 0000

In Bytes

0000: 55 00 6E 00 6B 00 6E 00 U.n.k.n.

0008: 6F 00 77 00 6E 00 00 00 o.w.n...

0010: 00 00

-----

Not that helpful. So I got down and dirty with SysInternal's Process Monitor and after some digging found out iexplore.exe kept going back and forth between the HOSTS file and dnscache registry keys (DNS Client) in what appears to be an infinite loop, though as mentioned it does usually _eventually_ launch after about 45 seconds due to some sort of "give up" mechanism. Alt-Tabbing during this sometimes even triggers WerFault.exe (Error Reporting/Crash) with Event Data that looks similar to:

----------0BEX64Not

available0svchost.exe6.2.9200.16420505a9a4entdll.dll6.2.9200.16420505ab40500000000000f49e8c000000d0000000000000000C:WindowsTempWERD2B2.tmp.appcompat.txt

C:WindowsTempWERD310.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml

C:WindowsTempWERD331.tmp.hdmp

C:WindowsTempWERD40C.tmp.dmpC:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsWERReportQueueAppCrash_svchost.exe_f231e9b59d88be13a28c757057f4c9296e8a75d0_cab_15e6d4380fdcc83ed-33ee-11e2-be91-e2983e1e0dac

4

-----------

Now, DNS Client was previously disabled as I use the rather sizable HOSTS file from mvps.org that has served me well for years. Needless to say, I'm curious to know why it would be required in this somewhat specific case, though the actions shown in Process Monitor appear to suggest a bug.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this helped someone.

 

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