Now my Google Street maps are working fine, as I said, but now I have the exact same symptom again when trying the Google Satellite URL provided in gnuite's 11-18-2006, 01:56 AM message. I doublechecked my typing, and it is correct. For the Cache Dir, I had first specified a directory on my memory card. When that didn't work, I tried /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/SatelliteMaps instead, and no change: In either case, a bunch of subdirectories and sub-subdirectories get created under the directory I specified; however there are no files in any of those sub-/subdirectories. The program claims it's downloading files, and does not report that it has any difficulty doing so, but it doesn't create any files, so I'm guessing that's the reason for the black screen.

Now here's a possible clue, perhaps: The other day, when I originally had this symptom with the Google Street maps....I posted my query here, and by the time I received an answer, I had installed a Nokia 770 software upgrade and reinstalled all my maemo applications, opened mapper's Manage Repositories dialog, saw that its settings had been retained by the backup/restore, closed the dialog without changing anything, and it said "Downloading maps" as always, and then it said "Failed to open file for writing". It had never said that before the upgrade! And yet, if it was having a problem opening files for writing, that would certainly explain my black screen symptom, I thought...so maybe that was the problem even though the error message had never popped up before.

However, I never reported that problem when it happened, because the very next time the program claimed "Downloading maps", it worked and my map was finally displayed! Everything in this program has been perfect since that moment, until tonight when I tried the Google Satellite URL and new Cache Dir setting (I assume that I should specify a different cache directory, right? Not just leave the same directory for both of the two map repositories, right?). My Google Street maps still work fine but the Google Satellite maps just show as a black screen.