been out and about all day but did manage to make some progress last night in a few minutes i had to kill. managed to get the files you supplied to install correctly in Firefox 3.6.13 running under Wine on Ubuntu.

Previously i just had a black screen with a white square and an application loading message. now i get a grey background, with the square and loading message, but after a few seconds it displays a german street map in the background. will try on vista machine tomorrow hopefully.

on a side note, i did notice the other day references in the maps.ovi.com site to a plugin, checking for version 5.xx. not sure if it was maps plugin or what. source is a lot different.