First of all, I want to be clear: I did manage to get Internet connection working on BlackBerry Simulator (run MDS, make sure it has permissions, then make sure nobody's hogging 8080 port, etc.)
It did work for some time. Loads google.com no problem, for example.
Then I try to open my website (the one that I'm debugging). It opens first time no problem. But after I hit "refresh", I get "Requesting..." at the bottom of the screen, and the progress bar goes slooooowly (logarithmically approaching the end - which indicates that it doesn't actually do anything except waiting on something), and once it reaches the end (which takes several minutes), an error message is displayed, saying "A communication failure occurred with the selected Mobile Data Service. The server may be busy. Please try again later. If the problem persists, contact your administrator".
After some painful digging in the garba... err... research, I found that it starts working again if I delete all *.dmp files in the RIM directory, then restart MDS and Simulator. But that operation also has another effect - resetting all Simulator settings (including "Enable JScript" setting and browser history), which is a real pain.
I tried to minimize the page to localize the issue, and found an interesting thing: after the page becomes small enough, it does manage to load a second time. And maybe even third. But then - same thing. This makes me think that the issue has something to do with the amount of data received by the Simulator.
If anybody has any advice on this, I would greatly appreciate.
To answer some questions in advance:
The problem is not with the website itself. It opens and works ok on "big" computer, on my WinMobile PDA, and on iPhone.
Restarting the Simulator doesn't help. Only deleting all *.dmp files does.
This problem does not occur on real Blackberry. Only on Simulator.
The Blackberry does think that there is network connection. If it thought that there was no connection, it would display an error message right away, without the long "Requestinng..." progress bar.
The web page is not too heavy (less than 20K in all; loads in a second the first time), but it does contain about a dozen of "included" files - CSS and scripts.
Yes, I did try to disable scripts. Same thing happens.
