There Be Dragons – Uncharted Internet Mapping

So I have had some issues with this new roll-out of OpenLayers 2.9. My maps are just “brown” without the Google, Yahoo, Bing or OpenStreetMaps underneath.
I fixed it by using the 2.8 version:

< script src=”http://openlayers.org/api/2.8/OpenLayers.js”&gt;

this fixes everything…I haven’t figured out what has changed yet…