Ok the ec27ser.exe is the ENC chart viewer, for marine charts. That is definately not it.

wltrysvc.exe is the wireless tray for dell true mobile wireless cards.

I update the hosts file about once a year, and no there are no redirects nor bad entries in the hosts file.

I believe that failed updates definately has to do with iexplore.exe process not running, or perhaps running within explorer.exe. Attached is the listing for all the modules loaded by explorer.exe. Like I said earlier, the more IE windows I open, the larger the memory consumed by the explorer.exe process.