Load balancing required for preauthentication?

I'm updating to 1.2.6 from a very old release and have been having
signing problems.  I determined it to be signing because turning
off the signing requirement in 2003 Server allowed for successful
authentication.  

While stepping through the code in the debugger, I noticed that
SmbSession.getChallenge(UniAddress) does not attempt to use the DEFAULT
credentials for preauthentication.  I switched to calling
SmbSession.getChallengeForDomain() and it seems to work fine.

To fix my code, I think I am going to make a local change to add a method like SmbSession.getChallenge(UniAddress) that calls
SmbSesesion.interrogate(UniAddress).challenge;

Does this sound appropriate?

Is there a reason this is not currently done this way?

For a little background, this is for a Java web server that is using
code similar to the NtlmHttpFilter.  I'm currently developing on
Mac OS X 10.4.3 with Java 1.5 talking to a Windows Server 2003, Enterprise
Edition running in VMWare on a Window XP Professional
laptop.  I'm testing with Firefox from my Mac though I
occassionally click around on IE in a Windows 2000 VM to make sure that it
works too.

We typically want to enable load balancing but would like to make it a configurable option.

Thanks, Andy