Sorry... I am a real newbie at this... it is, in fact, a resolv problem. With -x 10 I see the repeated callx to get_res returning with 0 (- 1,0)... this accounts for the timeout. The weird thing here is that my /etc/resolv.conf has one line in it that says "order hosts" and my /etc/hosts defines both the single client and the server according to IP, so this should return with a name and not timeout...