Well, here's an example of how our users use maps in our applications.

Some guy at BigOil enters our website and selects a market region--say, Los Angeles. Or Kansas City. Or Atlanta.

Oftentimes, he wants that first view to be an entire-market view. He wants to see all of his sites (say, 150 sites) plus all his competitors. Let's say his in blue, and competitors in red.

That initial view usually lets him orient himself to his presence in the market. Showing roads and highways alone at this point isn't useful to him. He wants to see his entire retail network at once.

From that point, he'll usually zoom in on an area or territory he wants to study in detail. This is often done by just visually identifying a cluster of outlets in the initial view. He may recognize this cluster as near such-and-such mall, or at this limited-access highway location.

So, seeing site coverage is very important. I've written these kinds of apps using MapInfo MapX and ArcIMS for six years now, and I've watched many of our clients start this way. Sure, sometimes they start with an address and never actually want to see a "macro" view. But often, at some point in the process they want to look--at least glance--at their overall market coverage.

I'm hopeful, after reading your post, that I can basically render 100 "hot spots" around the current (x,y) location, and any "leftover" sites I can maybe draw using the example you provided.

This, I would think, would take care of that issue. And if performance is awful, then we'll have to then talk about what things must go.

If I sounded like I'm bashing MapPoint, I'm not. You can't find a bigger MS homer than me. But I've been hopeful about moving our clients away from the big, expensive ESRI/MapInfo solutions and toward MapPoint (with an understandable shift in functionality), and I don't want to sacrifice usability if there's some other way.

Another possibility might be to "zoom-layer" with MapPoint somehow--show no pushpins until a certain zoom-level has been reached. Prior to that, maybe show nothing (not so good) or maybe do this client-draw method (better).