I've encountered a similar problem in my Mandrake 7.2 installation - if the
computer can't reach the DNS assigned to it, some applications behave like
you mentioned.
Midnight Commander stuff, and I guess that most GTK application attempt to
resolve their hostname by quering the DNS using gethostby
For your second question, see my post for the guy who asked how to configure
the simplest win->linux network. i.e. if you would give us some details of
how you configured the server, or what errors you are getting it might help
us solve your problem.
Just as a side wonder ... did you start the s
