huh, interesting. It's just a home network, I have some Vista machines on a wireless router, nothing fancy. I can resolve anything on the internet fine (ie. google.com), it's just resolving the local machine names that I'm having trouble with. If I try to ping a machine name, say:
ping COMPUTERNAME
ping: bad address 'COMPUTERNAME'

I tried editing the resolv.conf file, but it's still not working. Originally, the resolv.conf only listed the loopback address:
nameserver 127.0.0.7

but I've since changed it to my router's IP.

It's been a while since I've worked with a linux machine, but I'm pretty sure that I used to be able to ping windows machines using the computer name before....