YOu said you disabled NetBIOS due to YOUR opinion it is "junk," correct?

Do you have a single label name called "printers" created in DNS? You
mentioned you access your printers as printername.printers, hence the
question.

It also does not make sense that if you lose internet connectivity, that you
are unable to resolve your internal printers via FQDN. What may be happening
if one thinks this out further, is that your single label name query MUST be
sent out to the Root servers for resolution because DNS believes it is a TLD
(top level domain name, such as com, net, edu, etc). This was the main
reaons Microsoft removed the ability for Windows machines to work properly
with single label names. There were numerous complaints from ISC that
administrators unknowingly (misguided, uninformed, didn't attend a class, or
for whatever reason) were using single label names for their AD domain names
(and other names) and non understanding the implications it has on the
Internet Root servers.

Ace