As a handy debugging tip, any time you have code that's doing something `networky' (name resolution, creating a TCP connection) that mysteriously hangs for ~1-2 minutes it's often fruitful to use strace (well, not on NT of course :) or a packet sniffer (tcpdump, ethereal) to watch what exactly your code is doing when you see it hang (i.e. "Hrrm, it's sent a packet to the name server and it's now stuck . . .").