Odd behavior when clicking on internal link that is using a non-FQDN

[Smith, William E. (Bill), Jr.]

On one of our internal web pages, the following link is present,
http://mbserv1/pdp.  The server known as mbserv1 was shutdown about 2
months ago and is no longer present on our network.  Despite this, some
users have reported that when clicking the link, they are taken to a
French site.  When I reproduced this problem, I was taken to the
following page.  

http://forum.macbidouille.com/index.php?showtopic=73116&st=90

What exactly would be causing this?  My only guess is that it's related
to the hostname not being fully qualified and the browser subsequently
trying to resolve the request by appending a myriad of other domain
names before it finally found a match with mbserv1.macbidouille.com,
which in turn takes you to the MacBidouille home page.  The obvious fix
would be to fully qualify the domain name or better yet just remove the
link altogether since it's no longer valid.  That said, I'm curious as
to what is causing this and even more curious as to why I'm taking
directly to the forum page when clicking on the internal link but to the
home page when going to http://mbserv1.macbidouille.com

Bill Smith 
<mailto:bill.smith at jhuapl.edu> 
ISS Server Systems Group 
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 
11100 Johns Hopkins Road 
Laurel, MD 20723 
Phone:  443-778-5523 
Web:  http://www.jhuapl.edu