Good guess, but this has been going on for over a year and is noticably worse on the windows desktop now that it is Windows XP rather then Windows 2000.
Peter
PS: sadly IT is my line of work, and this has stumped me for for somethime now.
Well, there is one thing you are doing, which is actually a no-no, even according to MS. The domain used for the AD should NOT be a valid external-accessible on the internet domain. It supposedly confuses it. It particularly confuse the AD server when it comes to DNS. By separating your internal and external domains, you will save yourself some headaches.
I am an IT guy and we have the same setup (i.e. we use the same domain name “ourcompany.com” for AD that is also used for our internet e-mail and externally hosted website). It’'s not necessarily a “no-no” from Microsoft to do so but you have to understand that there is extra management overhead depending on how many externally hosted services you need to have available to your internal clients.
Basically, you have two different versions of your DNS zone “awad.ca”. The full zone is hosted internally on your own DNS servers and then a subset of those records are hosted externally on your ISP’‘s DNS servers (I’'m assuming you have your ISP hosting the “awad.ca” zone for name resolution by external clients). That external zone will probably have MX records for people to be able to send you e-mail as well as some A records for the “www” host that has your externally accessible website. The extra management overhead involved is that you have to manually maintain a record for that external “www” host on your internal DNS servers so that if an internal client goes to http://www.awad.ca/, they will get routed to the correct website.
Now, back to your problem… I would check the DNS settings for the client that you are trying the tests from. You should be hitting 10.0.0.1 for your DNS. If not, try setting the client to look to your internal DNS server (10.0.0.1) and running the tests again. If you’‘re hitting another server that’‘s just forwarding to an external DNS server, then you’'ll be seeing your internet addressable IP address (209.183.159.247) not your internal private one (10.0.0.20).
Feel free to reply if you have any more questions.
(BTW, Windows does suck but so does every OS. They all just suck in different ways.)