MacOS – DNS not resolving on Mac OS X

Some of my coworkers are having troubles on their Macs – DNS resolution does not work under Mac OS X. They're running Snow Leopard 10.6.8. They can use DNS in a Windows 7 virtual machine (VMware Fusion 3.1.3) running under OS X. The computers are 15" MacBook Pros, early 2011 model.

Things they've tried that have not worked:

• turning airport on/off
• rebooting
• using wired connection instead wifi
• deleting connection credentials and adding it again
• turning off Mac firewall
• using fixed static IP
• manually setting DNS servers
• restarting mDNSResponder
• the fixes from this other question

EDIT response Martín's answer:

• Can you ping the DNS you want to use?

$ ping apple.com
ping: cannot resolve apple.com: Unknown host

• What is/are the IP address(es) of the DNS(s) you want to use?

This is a company DNS server that is given with DHCP, it works well for
other people. I've also tried Google's 8.8.4.4 and 205.171.3.65 (which I found from GRC's DNS Benchmark to be the fastest).

• Have you tried using 8.8.8.8 (google) or any of the OpenDNS
208.67.222.222 or 208.67.220.220?

It doesn't work, see Google Chrome output:

The server at www.apple.com can't be found, because the DNS lookup failed. DNS is the network service that translates a website's name to its Internet address. This error is most often caused by having no connection to the Internet or a misconfigured network. It can also be caused by an unresponsive DNS server or a firewall preventing Google Chrome from accessing the network.

• Can you ping those hosts?

$ ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from
8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=3.925 ms

• creating a blank user

A guest user account was created, the DNS issue was still there when using
the guest account.

• nslookup and dig both work fine

$ nslookup www.apple.com 8.8.8.8
Server:  8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.apple.com canonical name = www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net.
www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net canonical name = www.apple.com.edgekey.net.
www.apple.com.edgekey.net canonical name = e3191.c.akamaiedge.net.
Name: e3191.c.akamaiedge.net
Address: 184.24.141.15

$ dig @8.8.8.8 www.apple.com
; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> @8.8.8.8 www.apple.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11298
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.apple.com.   IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.apple.com.  1041 IN CNAME www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net.
www.isg-apple.com.akadns.net. 38 IN CNAME www.apple.com.edgekey.net.
www.apple.com.edgekey.net. 8794 IN CNAME e3191.c.akamaiedge.net.
e3191.c.akamaiedge.net. 17 IN A 184.24.141.15
;; Query time: 4 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Tue Oct 4 09:25:28 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 158

• also flushing the DNS cache was done but it didn't help

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

EDIT 2:

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
#
# Mac OS X Notice
#
# This file is not used by the host name and address resolution
# or the DNS query routing mechanisms used by most processes on
# this Mac OS X system.
#
# This file is automatically generated.
#
domain {redacted}.com
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 208.67.222.222