Wireless Intermittent Super Slow DNS lookup bug in 10.6.4

Question

I don't normally post things on forums these days, as usually I can find just about any solution by searching long enough, but this issue has perplexed me to the point I actually had to come on here.
Believe me, that's a big deal, I don't give up easily.
I have spent -countless- hours searching, on here, on google, on any "solutions" or "technical" sites I could find, and the closest I can find to a solution are countless people complaining about the EXACT SAME PROBLEM that I have observed and, repeatedly, reproduced again and again, which in every single case boil down to this:
You had 10.6.x (x being 3 or less) with a wireless connection on your home network and all is well.
You upgraded to 10.6.4 and all seemed fine for maybe 24 hours or so... then it happens. You go to load a website, and it's "looking for site" or "waiting for site" in your status bar... hmm, maybe it's just this site you say, so you try another, or a few others in other tabs, but they all have the same problem.
You try to ping the sites, but the network utility can't resolve the domain to even ping them.
Your roommate, all the while, is surfing and gaming just fine on the exact same router you are on, so no, it's not the network hardware, it's not your ISP, hmm, what could it be?
All of a sudden, ALL of the sites you had in like 20 tabs load up at screaming speeds, "WOW" you say, "guess there must have just been some gunk in the wires or something" (notice the irony of the situation: no wires)... anyway, all seems fine again suddenly, surfing is fine for a few minutes, you're back to normal... and it happens again, suddenly NO site will resolve, NO dns will resolve, you can't check email or ping any domain... and so the cycle begins. Of course, you can just plug an ethernet cable straight into the router, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of having wireless networking in the first place?
It continues like this, indefinitely, and it all starts roughly 24 hours after 10.6.4 has been installed.
I have read reports of people on macbooks, people on imacs, people on all sorts of different wireless hardware, but the symptoms are the same.
I know the problem is with the OS update, it's purely software. I know that it has nothing to do with hardware because simply reverting to 10.6.3 solves the problem -every single time- and then "upgrading" to 10.6.4 causes the problem to come back within 24 hours -every single time- (have been reverting using Time Machine to simplify this testing process), so no, where the problem is isn't what perplexes me; what perplexes me is that there are posts that started almost a few days after 10.6.4 came out, and so far there's STILL no fix? Are you freaking serious? Does the Apple programming team not have access to anything other than Apple-Branded Airport Extreme Base Stations to perform wireless network QA testing on?
Get a Linksys guys, grab a D-Link, go get some of the hardware people actually USE and test it on that and see what happens, it doesn't take long to see what's happening.
I blame the programmers because I am one myself and know how easy it is to screw up a rock-solid system with one little typo. Heck, which patch was it, 10.5.7 or 10.5.8 I think? Can't remember exactly, but it was supposed to be such a great "bug fix" patch... and it came with the config file for Apache set to DENY ALL INCOMING EXTERNAL CONNECTIONS by default (in a hidden file that can only be modified by the root user mind you... so much for the average user running a personal web server on THAT version), so yeah, one tiny mistake and it has huge consequences, my question is: what's taking so long to track down what's going on in 10.6.4 and fix it? Can we at least get a patch or something?
I find it really lame and really such a cop-out to see so many irrelevant "solutions" offered, "try specifying different DNS servers" (doesn't matter, whatever causes this bug doesn't care which servers you have specified, it simply sits there and does NOTHING for 2-3 minutes, and THEN when it actually DOES do a dns lookup, it gets the results in the time expected: instantly), to more extreme matters, like resetting hardware, which again has absolutely nothing to do with this bug.
Here is why anyone can see this is an obvious bug that the programming team needs to admit, investigate and correct:
A. happens immediately after the software update
B. happens to EVERYONE who uses traditional wireless routers for internet use
C. is 100% repeatedly reproducible
D. occurs on all different models of computers and all different ISP's and with all different DNS servers specified.
E. has the same symptoms on every system (lightning fast internet for 2-3 minutes, then "waiting for site" for 1-3 minutes)
F. affects EVERY network-using program on the computer (email, network utility, firefox, safari) SIMULTANEOUSLY
G. does not affect surfing to or interacting with IP addresses directly, only with trying to perform DNS lookups from ANY program with ANY dns server (or no dns server) set in network preferences.
Come on guys, just read it through, think about it for a few minutes, for anyone that has worked with and knows the underlying source code, and what changes went in between 10.6.3 and 10.6.4 specifically to networking, should have a light bulb pop up over their head and say "oh YEAH, we never uncommented that one line..." or something to that effect.

Answer 1

I see a very similar issue, but it's been occurring on my laptop for 4 or 5 months, which must be way before 10.6.4. My roommate and friend's laptops all work fine on my network. And my laptop works fine on anyone else's network. But MY laptop on MY network always gives the abysmal DNS performance as described in the original post: 40% of requests time out. Wireless or wired, it doesn't matter. Exact same behavior.
It also doesn't matter whether I use my Netgear router as DNS server, or my ISP, or OpenDNS, or Google. Exact same behavior.
When I do a network trace, it looks like most DNS requests my computer sends out simply never get responded to. (Could they be malformed when they hit the wire? I don't even see an error reply) A few make it through. And when there's a IPv6 (AAAA) record sent, my computer returns a "port unreachable" ICMP message. A screenshot of all of this dialogue is here:
http://img545.imageshack.us/i/screenshot20100913at114.png/
I recently had opportunity to cancel my cable service, and reinstate it for a lower price. They came out, tested the line (strong signal), gave me a new cable box. Yet the issue persists. Exact same behavior.
Firewall is disabled. I've deleted the network interfaces and added them back. Nothing helps.
(As I recall, this issue may even have been present before I reinstalled 10.6 over 10.5, so I'm not too confident a total reinstall would help.)
Any help? I'm about ready to buy a new laptop to fix this damned problem. Web browsing is nearly impossible, as is.