dcpromo on Win2k crashes with error 128

Stumbled on this problem setting up AD (finally!) for our office.

dcpromo kept crashing and reporting a services.exe error 128 and triggering an auto reboot. The root problem (comment #14 there) turned out to be a large hosts file. Some years ago I had used the Spybot hosts file entries. Apparently Win2k didn't appreciate that during dcpromo. Removing those entries and rolling back to a simple hosts file fixed the problem.