I'll reply to my own post since there are so many good questions here.

In a nutshell, it WAS &%#@*^@$! ZoneAlarm doing it. I had posted that there were no software firewalls such as that, but - it was installed. See - I recently brought up an old ghost image I had made many months ago, kind of a "known good barebones installation". Well obviously I thought it was good. I think before I ghosted it, I had gone through msconfig and turned a few programs off from the services and startup tabs, including ZoneAlarm. So when I recently reloaded the image, it was never in the systray, and since I hadn't re-installed it since I pulled the ghost image, I had believed that ZA was not installed. Well, hells bells, it had been.

I ran a program on a suggestion from other friends called Ethereal. Basically installed it, opened it up, and had it "capture" activity. Opened a web page, let it hit the DNS error, and then stopped the capturing. Looking at it, one of them identified an IP address 147.208.130.167 buried in it as belonging to the ZA program. Not sure what it was doing, but - it was getting unhappy after a while and cutting me off. Obviously I had not thouroughly kept the program from running when I (thought I had) killed it through msconfig. I did that so long ago I forgot I ever installed it.

So, that's what it was. I reinstalled ZA (I guess I could have uninstalled it instead just as well), and everything is peachy now. Been up for an hour and no problems at all (knocks on wood).

THANK YOU for all the replies and ideas, they were greatly appreciated, and in fact led me down the path of capturing what the network was actually doing. Hopefully it was a fun subject to think about?

Thanks again -

Greg