i am reading this forum and would be glad to have a solution as well, as i am having the same problem.
my system is a debian linux sid unstable amd64.
i had googleearth up and running, but this changed with a system upgrade from testing to unstable.
i believe it has to do with the xorg version, but it could have to do as well with the fglrx-driver update for my radeon 9600 pro graphics card or other things.
actually i am not considering downgrading to find out, instead i hope that someone fixes this issue.