This tip from Kevin Kelly (not of kevinkelly.org, btw, but my co-worker – Hi Kev!).

Anyhow, if, like us, you need to do your development in a single-server installation that’s network-isolated (either SPS2003 or MOSS2007), you may have found that there are some issues when you install and try to use some SharePoint/Visual Studio features. You get what look like network name-resolution issues and other related issues. (I’ll provide more specific error information when I next see it.)

It turns out that the Visual Studio/SharePoint features that raise the errors are using the same COM model/object and raising contention issues with the System Event Notification Service. If you stop the System Event Notification Service then the features you’re trying to use start working fine.

The problem is of course that if you disable the System Event Notification Service, your code may not log events properly to the event logs. So be sure you know whether the thing is on or off while you’re doing troubleshooting!

I’ll play with this more and try to come up with some screenshots/error messages when I get the new MOSS 2007 VPC to play with (a few weeks) that my company’s creating.