I installed a fresh redhat 6.1 system, and found that named
was losing. I found that I was able to do dns lookup by
hand using nslookup, but things like netscape and ssh
failed to function properly. I found that my local
nameservers were not being accessed by named, and added a
local /var/named file.

I continued to not be able to do dns resolution, except with
nslookup. After more groveling through /etc and various
named references, I added a "nameserver 127.0.0.1" line to
/etc/resolv.conf and am now happily resolving names left and
right.

A friend of mine just had the same issue, and it was
resolved in the same way.