So, you didn't snoop the wire? My calculus teacher used to say, "What do
we do now? Punt?" Open Wireshark. snoop. investigate.
No. I'm not going to be able to diagnose anything from binary traffic on the wire. If it is Windows protocol problem, I would have to spend a fair amount of time learning what the correct protocol is before I could even hope to recognize a defect, and if it is a coding problem, I would have to spend a fair amount of time learning the binary encoding before I could even hope to recognize a defect.
And it is probably not anything I would see on the wire anyway, since this problem happens with the command, "dir \\nas0.tclc.org\d0" on the domain controller, meaning the problem is happening long before any SaMBa activity. The SaMBa activity is fine since "mount //nas0.tclc.org/d net/nas0/d0 ... " works just fine. I interpret this to mean that the problem is not in the DNS server, or the SaMBa server; the problems seems to be how Windows asks for or interprets the domain name.
And besides, I have a diagnosis confirmed by ASUS, and I have a nearly zero cost work-around, so I don't have to go digging into wire level protocols or encodings.