Comment 27 for bug 67936

I have found that given enough reboots I can always get my system on my home (wifi) or work (ethernet with lots of search domains and hosts entries) networks. I simply have to (usually when I get home from work) delete all the custom entries from /etc/hosts and reboot. Then network-admin will launch okay.

I think one solution would be to make a backup of your base hosts file (no extra entries, just the ones ubuntu put there), and write a shell script like:
#!/bin/sh
## restore_hosts.sh restores the /etc/hosts file to curcumvent
## the bug: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bug/67936
cp -f /etc/hosts.bak /etc/hosts

Then maybe make the script run on boot, or run on Gnome start up. I don't know if the Gnome startup would be too late to avoid the problem. I've never done the former task, but I think you just put the shell script in /etc/init.d/ and symlink to in from the proper runlevel. (/etc/rc[X].d/ where [X] is your default runlevel) based on:
"man runlevel" and calling runlevel on my machine which I consider to be standard Ubuntu, you would use:
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/restore_hosts.sh /etc/rc2.d/S10restore_hosts.sh

Since gdm is linked as /etc/rc2.d/S13gdm

Hope that helps.

As far as comparing to Windows 95, imagine how many issues Windows 95 would have had if it were developed by free time hobbyists.