yup the root servers are resolving now.
Joe, when you register a website address or URL, you have to specify 2 DNS servers, a primary and a backup. These DNS servers will be the ones that translate
www.mydomain.com to an IP address like 111.111.111.111. There are multitudes of DNS servers on the web and they dont all know each other until they need to. The way it works is it all starts with the root hint servers. Here are the current root hint servers:
http://www.root-servers.org/. Here is the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver.
Here is the wiki for DNS in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System.
A DNS request to your ISPs DNS servers is made every time you type an
HTTP:// address in your browser. Whenever a DNS request is made, the server will use a saved record if it has already learned it. But these cached lookups expire depending on how your DNS servers are setup and they don't have all the addresses. So if your DNS servers don't have it in cache, then that DNS server goes to the DNS server it is pointed at, if not the root servers themselves. At some point in the chain there will be a link from a DNS server to the root hint servers. The root servers then will supply the correct name servers which then are queried until eventually the primary and backup DNS servers you registered your site with above are provided...if everything works right

. Then your DNS servers pull that record and save it and connect you to the site.
Now another problem that can happen is that the cached records don't expire. Lets say that you had to make a change to your registry and the root servers resolved it immediately. Well not all the DNS servers on all the ISPs in the world will know about it until their cache expires and they go requiry the new records. I've had that happen too.
The trick with the hosts file bypasses all that. Your operating system will check your hosts file before asking a DNS server.
Which BTW a word on that. Don't add too many lines to your hosts file and for sure put any lines you do add below the localhost line. Now that the DNS servers have all caught up I'd suggest everybody that added it to their hosts files to go comment it out. Unix is better at hosts files than windows.
Lastly you don't normally dink with your registration but sometimes you have no choice. In my case my provider changed my IPs and I had no choice. In some cases you will have to change providers or you may have to change your hosting service if you are using them. Sometimes you have to change registrars. And sometimes it just makes plain economic sense to make a change.