AFP Not Working

So I've been beating my head against the wall trying to solve a problem with both a Macbook and Macbook Pro not being able to see the AFP share on my ReadyNAS Pro on my home network. I'm a Mac newbie, so please forgive me if I don't know some obvious things.
Here's the breakdown of my diagnostics

Macbook Pro is running 10.6.5 as of 11/10/2010 and the Macbook is running 10.6.3
BOTH Macbooks CAN see an AFP share for a ReadyNAS NV+ that I have in my office.
ReadyNAS Pro is running 4.2.15
ReadyNAS NV+ is running the latest version (the number escapes me)
On my home network the Macbooks CAN see each others AFP shares when i turn on sharing
There is no WINS server on the network

Now pay attention....
If I do an Option-K and explicitly type afp://nas-ipaddress it connects but it shows up as connected as a PC Server (so its dropping to smb anyway)
If I turn off CIFS on the readynas and explicity type afp://ip-address it connects via afp and shows up as a Mac Server (so now it can connect using AFP).
Under no circumstances does typing afp://nas-name work. It fails immediately.
However from windows boxes (when cifs is on of course), doing a start run //nas-name works fine.

All equipment is connected to a single linksys E3000 running DD-WRT firmware. The ReadyNAS is wired to the E3000, and the macbooks have been connected both wired and wireless with the same results. The E3000 is a pure WAP only; no filtering or firewall is active, there is a FIOS router on the external and it only supports G speeds which was unacceptable :)

So it really looks like the ReadyNAS isn't broadcasting AFP properly. I've tried unchecking every afp option and rebooting and turning on afp/bonjour options one by one with a reboot between each change to no avail.

Before you suggest CIFS (which works fine), the whole point of this is to get Time Machine working and TM is not seeing the CIFS share as a configurable remote device even if i connect to the ReadyNAS before running TM. It doesn't even see the afp share when i disabled cifs on the ReadyNAS and did an option-K to connect to the nas ip address.

A question I do have concerns name resolution for mac's. In the windows world if you are in the same workgroup, machines names are advertised via netbios (in the old days netbeui), is that what bonjour does in the mac world?

I've been searching the forums and reading some very long threads about problems with afp and SL, but it looks like the later firmwares were supposed to fix the afp problems.
Is this still an issue for people?

EDIT: Saw some threads about jumbo frames so I've tried both on and off, same results.
Any thoughs on this?