Does the printing system use the same IP translation as pi..

I have a local area network (like probably 99% of most homes) that
consists of a cable modem attached to a Linksys router. The router is
the DHCP server handing out IP addresses to the machines on the net. I
don't run any kind of local DNS server (at least not that I know about).

I've always had trouble locating machines on the network without going
to the router and looking at the DHCP table.

When I got a mac and put it on the network, I noticed that I could get
to every machine by tacking a ".local" onto the end of the hostname. So,
machine.local would get me to the computer named "machine".

I had installed Apple's bonjour (for windows) onto my machine and have
been able to print to my networked printers up until I installed SP3.
Now I can still ping the printer.local in a cmd window, but the printer
spooling system can't seem to use the "printer.local" as the printer name.

Does the printing system use a different way to translate hostnames than
a ping command or does Bonjour for apple install some DLL that sits in
the middle of the printing system translation? Anyone here know?

The weird thing is that I can ping the printer.local hostname and I can
use it in IE to get to the printer's webpage server, but I can't use
printer.local as the hostname in the printer's port page.

-Alan