Help please: BIND 8.1.2 cannot resolve external names

[Hellion]

Hello out there.  I am having a problem setting up a BIND 8.1.2 server on a
RedHat Linux 5.2 system.
I'm trying to migrate a DNS setup from a FreeBSD box running BIND 4.9.3 and
as far as I can tell,
I have everything moved over correctly.  When I do an nslookup on any name 
within the domains
that the server is actually serving, I get a result, nice and quick.  But! 
Whenever I try to resolve a
name that is external to my domain (e.g. www.redhat.com), the request times
out.  When I turn on
debugging data from named, it appears that any request the server makes to 
one of the root servers
is ignored.  (I made sure that I had the latest version of the root.hints 
file, too.)  There's a whole bunch
of resend requests to various root servers in turn and never any replies.
  What makes this extra frustrating is that the identical setup on the 
FreeBSD box (well, except for
the named.conf/named.boot formatting) works perfectly.  And when I say 
identical, I mean I copied the
DNS data files verbatim, converted the config file, took the FreeBSD box 
off the net, and gave the 
Linux box its hostname and IP address to test things out.
  Anybody have any ideas as to what I might have done wrong?  A solution 
will earn you my undying
(well, slowly fading, at least) gratitude.

Elliott
hellion at visi.com-or-elliott@virtualfund.com