A few well placed lmhosts entries should confirm or discount the need for WINS. AFAIK, lmhosts is just as effective as WINS for testing.
I do know the purpose of the search suffix and don't at this point suggest you need to deploy it forest-wide. My thought was that if a call was made that lacked the suffix, the search suffix list would be tried one-by-one until exhausted. You could manually populate the search list for testing purposes. If that works, you can then consider populating by a GPO.
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Give a man a fish and he will be back for more. Slap him with a fish and he will go away forever.
