failure modifying /etc/hosts on NM profile change

(Submitted this bug to NetworkManager bug tracker, and they say it's an Ubuntu program that touches /etc/hosts)

Using Ubuntu 7.10 amd64

When using NM to change from one profile to another, after a few changes, first
Mozilla stops being able to resolve hostnames (even though the network works
and I can resolve hostnames from the command line) and then my session dies.
The intervening issues don't have to do with NM, so I'll report them to the
glibc people (it turns out that having a line in /etc/hosts that's >3,000
characters causes important things to segfault), but I blame NM for causing
that 3000+ character line in my /etc/hosts file. If you really need it, I can
push NM to breaking things again (this has happened twice when messing with
profiles), so I can post the broken hosts file. I attach my fixed hosts file,
with [[*]] indicating where the previous word was repeated ~350 times and
followed by ~700 empty lines:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 thelema-laptop

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

72.151.208.234 philwall [[*]]
192.168.0.2 sampo

Thanks for looking into this.