thanks. that did the trick.

i suspect that at first when i didnt have the map data i moved away from israel inro the see. so later when i tried all the update options in both the file and the find menus it still appeared as if i didnt have map data.

later for some reason the application started getting segmentation fault a few seconds after i launched it comsistently. a problem that wasnt resolved with a reinstallation, but got resolved as soon as i removed the contents of the maps folder.