Google Desktop was sometimes locking up on find-as-you-type, taking the CPU to 99%, and requiring me to kill and restart GoogleDesktop.exe to fix things.

I ran TCPView, both with WinInet proxy on and off, and found that GoogleDesktop was connecting to my proxy or to gx-in-f101.google.co, when it starts find-as-you-type.  For whatever reason (perhaps the  firewall is blocking gx-in-f101.google.com), connections don’t succeed, and GoogleDesktop apparently spins in a tight loop, waiting for the connection.

If proxy was enabled, GoogleDesktop was connecting to the proxy, EVEN IF don’t-use-proxy-for-local was checked, and gx-in-f101.google.com was entered in the list of local addresses.

Hello, Google?  Not everyone has 100% reliable connectivity to gx-in-f101.google.com, and it looks like you are only using part of the Wininet proxy config info.

The solution is to use a PAC file and to direct gx-in-f101.google.com to ""PROXY localhost:1", to make the connection cleanly fail.  Prevents the lock-up on find-as-you-type.

UPDATE: GDS does a query to suggestqueries.google.com,  and this query returns status 200.  Blocking it doesn’t prevent the lock-up.