We study the cover time of a random graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with vertex set [n] and degree sequence. In a previous work (Abdullah, Cooper, and Frieze, Discrete Math 312 (2012), 3146-3163), the asymptotic cover time was obtained under a number of assumptions on d, the most significant being that d(i) 3 for all i. Here we replace this assumption by d(i) 2. As a corollary, we establish the asymptotic cover time for the 2-core of the emerging giant component of G(n,p). (c) 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 45, 627-674, 2014