Re: please debug -- icon colors

It looks to me like you are creating a marker ("theMarker") but are
never returning it from your createMarker function.

Did you see my examples on how to make different colored icons work:
http://www.geocodezip.com/

This is one way of doing it:
http://www.geocodezip.com/basic8h.asp?filename=example_icons.xml

(notice the "return marker;" at the end of createMarker)

-- Larry