I have a Windows 7 professional x64 pc that intermittently fails to resolve host aliases. The nameserver is a Fedora 11 system running bind 9.6.2-p2. Its cannonical name is trixter.intranet.org, and it serves several web sites, each with a different host alias: hg.intranet.org, svn.intranet.org, bugzilla.intranet.org, etc.

Occasionally, the Windows pc will be unable to find any of the aliased hosts, even when it can find the canonical name. The aliases will be un-resolvable for a period of several minutes, and then, with no intervention, they can be found again. Trixter can always resolve the aliases to itself.

Even stranger, when I use Cygwin from the problematic Windows 7 PC, it CAN resolve the hosts. I can ping hg.intranet.org from a Cygwin shell, but not from a “cmd.exe” window. Administrator privileges make no difference.

Anyone else seen this problem, and for a way to prevent/ work around it?

Sorry friend. The best solution you can use is to go to http://distrowatch.com pick out a Linux distribution that you find interesting, download it, burn a .iso image of it on DC or DVD, run it from live cd/dvd (test your hardware on it,) repeat if necessary, until you find one you like, then wipe winblows from you computer while installing a great system. That will solve your problem. I don't have windows problems because I don't have winblows. period.
Hope that helps.