Network browsing causes DNS lookup?

[Lee Howard]

I have DNS servers that are RedHat Linux 6.1 (updated) and serve a slew of
Windows machines.  I've noticed that on some of the workstations when they
browse Network Neighborhood and then try to browse a non-existent (although
appearing - they sometimes stick around for a while after shutdown) network
or workstation, or even browse a downed share, that they make a DNS query.

For example, if there's a system called 'SECRETARY' in the network, and
then it gets turned off and somebody (specific somebodies - I haven't been
able to isolate the requirements, but it seems machine-specific) browses
Network Neighborhood and double-clicks the still-appearing SECRETARY icon,
a query gets placed to DNS, and pretty soon I see logs on the DNS servers
that somebody looked for SECRETARY.domain.com  This is interesting to me,
because I thought that this was independent from DNS.  I thought that the
network names could (and perhaps should) be different from DNS names.

Could somebody please explain this to me?  Thanks.

Lee Howard