Are there any downsides in disabling NetBIOS?

Hello Experts,

I recently ran into an error after rebooting our two servers at my company.  One server is running exchange and data and the other is our domain controller and Active Directory manager.  After rebooting, every client computer upon booting up gave a "duplicate name exists on the network" error.  It didn't mean anything since all the drives and everything still worked okay, but everytime we rebooted, that error came up.  I searched all around and couldn't find much.  I've changed the computer name and cleaned out most of AD wherever duplicate names were spotted and we still got that error.  The only thing that fixed it was disabling NetBIOS.  Funny thing is, computers which are running Windows 7 did not give that error, but all XP machines did.  I disabled NetBIOS on all the XP machines and the error is gone.  I don't know much about NetBIOS, but is there any downsides in disabling this?  Could anything potentially not work correctly with this disabled?  Thanks in advance.