WON Director of Technology Stuart Seelye sends word of a workaround they've implemented to overcome a problem that's been plaguing the in-game Half-Life server browser, as well as news that this is just a temporary measure that will be addressed in a future Half-Life update. Here's the deal:

The Half-Life server browser problem that a lot of people have been experiencing - the one with about seventy message boxes saying something like "Expecting '{', got 'CS'" - is due to a bug in the Half-Life client that is invoked by a particular misconfigured game server. The bug in the client will be fixed in the upcoming Half-Life update. In the meantime though, I got the master server code from Yahn at Valve and implemented an ip banning feature. The game server that was causing the problem is now banned. This is only a temporary fix until the update comes out.

The master server solution will prevent the problem from occurring again, but users still need to delete the favsvrs.dat file in their half-life directory if they get the error messages. Or they can just hit the update button in the server browser. Either method will work to blow out the favsvrs cache.