we lost our ability to resolve domin names while in the middle of surfin with firefox on slack 10 and the KDE that ships with it... all dns is down, local nework functions although it seemes delyed, no names will resolve although ip's ping out fine... how do we find out what failed?

P.S. the rest of the network is fine, and can see the linux machines samba shares

Your question says it: "all dns is down". Have you checked to see if DNS is up on your system?

Yes, all the other (winblows) pc's on te network operate normally and my router seems normal the problem is isolated to the one machine

Well that gives a lot more information to the picture....might have mentioned that at first.

Has anyone changed anything on the machine? The /etc/resolv.conf may have been changed, which tells it who to ask for addresses.

nobody else has access and was using a standard login to surf when it happened, no upgrades or updates lately, and i'm runnin the reiserfs if that makes a difference

checked the /etc/resolv.conf and it had my dns server listed proper and domain as well on the next line so i believe that's ok

Try running "dig www.google.com" (no quotes) from the command line and see if you get the address to resolve. Is so, the problem is Firefox specific. I've occasional had Firefox go bonkers (mostly earlier versions), in which case just restarting it should fix it. If the dig command doesn't resolve an address, you need to check for a communication problem between the machine and the DNS server. Can you ping the DNS server? Can other machines on the network (sanity check in case the DNS server is behind a firewall that doesn't allow ICMP traffic through)? Is there any firewall on the machine itself or anywhere else in the path that would block port 53 TCP or UDP traffic?