guess the main point of my suggestion was Terminal, though.
Doni, you are quite right! I am less than a newbie on Terminal but did it from A to Z without any searches. First, thanks to Alternaut for great links! The invisible host file cannot be edited directly because even the admin user cannot save the edits; this is why BBEdit and the likes were suggested. But many do not have this/do not know how to use it, and have no ad blockers. So, I just followed the instructions in one of the Alternaut's links to edit the file in Terminal and flush the caches there too. The instructions are explicit (I did not put any $ sign before the command) and it worked even in Snow Leopard. The link I used was this:
http://decoding.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-in-mac-os-x-leopard/Hope this is helpful for dummies like me.
