Ok, I've searched far and wide (mostly in forums relating to WAMP and APACHE), but I suspect this is related to Win7, so I thought I'd try here.
I've used WAMP for several years, with several vhosts set up on development machines using WinXP, then Vista, and now Win7. This *same* setup worked...
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When I am away from home I often have no access to the Internet. But it never used to matter because my laptop was XP and I used localhost/hosts/127.0.01 and virtual hosts in Apache to work on the train whilst travelling etc with my website development stuff.
Until I installed Vista Ultimate...