When trying out a SLED 10 Sp2 Configuration which authenticates against
a Windows 2003 R2 ADS I ran into a timeout which A: was very annoying
and B: did prevent me from logging in (winbind timed out).

It seems the cause for it was twofold:
Since I am a good DNS citizen I chose a *.local Name for my testing
Domain. And I did not configure mdns off in /etc/host.conf. I simply
didnt know. (Argh) Now I do. (From this post )

Excerpt from the (5) host.conf manpage:

mdns

Valid values are on and off. If set to on, the resolv+ library treats
the .local top level domain as link-local domain and sends multicast DNS
requests to the multicast address 224.0.0.251 port 5353 instead of
normal DNS requests. If you already use the .local domain in your
nameserver configuration you will have to switch this option off. See
http://www.multicastdns.org for more information on multicast DNS. on
by default.