I am also getting this message. I am running Phex 0.7.3 under Linux with JRE 1.4. My hosts file is empty and every connection to a host list server results in "Error. Connection refused."

I am behind a firewall, but this used to work just fine. Also, when in Windows I can use Gnucleus just fine and it connects to some of the same host list servers.

My firewall log shows nothing, so it's not blocking the connections.