There are several hosts on a test network that do not have a FQDN, these hostnames are defined in the Windows Vista HOSTS file. Applications like Oracle 10g client and Putty have no problem with this, but Firefox always insists on using the proxy, which then adds the domain name to the host name, making it impossible to connect to the local machines. The question is: Why does Firefox not recognise the proxy exception list? Why does it still go through the proxy even though I explicitely put the hosts in the exception list? == This happened == Every time Firefox opened == Has always happened