We are an IT consulting company and we have explicitly disabled all NetBIOS funcionality on nearly all customer networks that we have setup/inherited since day one of Windows 2000 shipping. The ONLY exceptions have been when the customer had a home-grown application that required NetBIOS and even in those cases we have worked through getting those applications modified or replaced.

Many software companies have taken the "safe road" when it comes to specifying their sorftware "requirements". The bottom line is that many software companies/developers didn't know if their software required NetBIOS or not, so they simply said, "yes, it does". In reality, such software often runs fine without NetBIOS. Even MS Exchange has continued to call out the NetBIOS requirement in their documentation all the way up until Exchange 2007. However, we haven't used NetBIOS with Exchange, since version 5.x. Yes, there are a couple of specific scenarios where NetBIOS might be required for Exchange 200x; however, probably more than 85% of Exchange implementations will work fine or even better without it.

As for Network Browsing (a la "My Network Places" et al), that is the last thing you want on your network...unless you are talking about a two or three PC network at your house. But, in that case, you probably won't be running Windows Server 2008 anyway. On real networks, the Network Browsing service slows down the network, it can be unreliable, it is not scalable (unless it is implemented with WINS and even then it is not exactly super robust), and it makes a hacker's job at least 10 times easier.

We have dramitically reduced the number of support calls from customers over the years, and a big part of that has been getting away from NetBIOS. Granted, in SOME cases NetBIOS can cover a multitude of sins in lieu of following best practices and proper implementation. However, if best practices are followed for network configuration, DNS configuration, Active Directory/Group Policy configuration, DHCP configuration, etc. then a NetBIOS-free network is a better, happier, faster, more reliable, more predictable, easier to troubleshoot, more secure network.