Using lwres for DNS

[urgrue]

As the standard resolver is frankly pretty bad, I'd like to try lwresd,
but I'm not succeeding at getting it working.
Has anyone used this successfully in RHEL 5?

DNS works fine without lwres. I'm doing this:
lwresd -f -g -u named  -d 999

Now if I put lwres in nsswitch.conf as the only hosts: entry DNS simply
doesn't resolve anything. Debug output shows lwres is not even getting
any queries (does RHEL nss not support lwres?).

Additionally, making a direct query to it (dig some.domain.com
@127.0.0.1 -p 921) fails as well, with the following debug info:
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.285 socket 0x2b27207de230: dispatch_recv:  event
0x2b27207ee6d0 -> task 0x2b27207ee4b0
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.285 socket 0x2b27207de230: internal_recv: task
0x2b27207ee4b0 got event 0x2b27207de2e0
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.285 socket 0x2b27207de230 127.0.0.1#42825: packet
received correctly
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.285 socket 0x2b27207de230: processing cmsg
0x2b27207de400
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 event received: task 0x2b27207ee4b0, length 41,
result 0 (success)
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 sockmgr 0x2b27206fb750: watcher got message -3
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 sockmgr 0x2b27206fb750: watcher got message -2
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 socket 0x2b27207de230: socket_recv: event
0x2aaaac000a00 -> task 0x2b27207ee4b0
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 invalid packet header received
10-Sep-2010 11:46:00.286 restarting client 0x2b27207e93c0...

resolv.conf looks like this:
search domain.com
nameserver 1.2.3.4
nameserver 5.6.7.8
nameserver 9.10.11.12
options rotate
options timeout:1
options attempts:1