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I use a custom hosts file (well, technically I run it as an internal DNS server) from Someone Who Cares to block most of the aforementioned annoyances: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

It works very well for me so I'd recommend it to others, if they're not already aware of it.

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I've always wondered if Windows or other operative systems read the entire hosts file everytime they want to resolve an address. Maybe a big hosts file is bad for network performance?

It will largely be read out of memory, since it doesn't change much and is frequently requested. Scanning 64K or so won't break a sweat compared to doing a DNS lookup across the network to a resolver that might itself need to make a request.

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