Last week I fired up a website that I'm currently developing locally only to find out that it wasn't working as it was the night before, (or at all). After an inital stage of panic and 'what did I do' moments... I deduced the problem down to the fact that my OS X now wont resolve localhost properly, so connections to my SQL database were failing.

I can still ping localhost in the terminal, but in order to get my websites up and running again, I had to change all the localhost entries to 127.0.0.1

This isn't a huge problem as everything is up and running again, but I would like to try to get to the bottom of it. I have a sneaking suspicion that an apple software update caused this issue, as I don't recall doing anything else that would have had any effect.

Other than my hosts file (which looks normal), what else could be causing this? Running OSX 10.6.4