Vista - Ping on Workgroup Computer Names Bad / IP Addresses Good / Internet Good

Hello,
I am new to the forum, but not new to computing. I recently started having problems with this Vista Home Premium box not being able to resolve DNS names for only computers on my home network (all others XP boxes or Windows Server 2003). It can ping the IP addresses of the local boxes. It doesn't have a problem connecting to the internet. But this is a big problem when it comes to sharing files within my local network.

I have disabled Windows Firewall and McAfee Firewall and Services to try and diagnose the problem.

I have been googling this for a couple of days looking for ideas, but I have none. I have validated that DNS is running. NETBios over DHCP is enabled. Subnet mask is 255.255.255. DHCP and DNS server IP is correct.

Anything that anyone could point me to try? I am out of ideas.

Unless you've got a DNS server running at home, it's rather unlikely that DNS is being used to resolve names of your home computers when pinging by name. Instead, the machine does a broadcast (on the local segment) to the effect of "if you're called XYZ, please get back to me and tell me your IP address".

If that's not working for you, my first inclination would be to suspect firewalls on the other machines - not necessarily on the machine exhibiting symptoms. Try disabling and even uninstalling (3rd-party) firewalls while you're troubleshooting, and also test what happens when all machines are booted to [safe mode + net].

Well, doesn't the router behave in the capacity of a DNS server in this case? According to my ipconfig /all output it thinks that the DNS server is the router.

The router is a DNS proxy. It forwards DNS queries from your machines to its own DNS servers - the ones whose IP addresses it got from your ISP.

Your machines don't register their names in DNS, and even if they did there would be no zone to register them under unless you've got your own domain right there in the living room. >99% of home networks don't function that way.

Trust me, your in-house name resolution is not dependent on DNS.