Eitan,
I copied nav_view.xml from move_base_stage/move_base, changing the remappings to topics that exist in my system. That along with your two suggestions seem to have done the trick. There are, however, a few odd things:
-when I start up nav_view, the map takes a *really* long time to show up - on the order of 5 minutes
-once the robot gets to its goal, it spins around a lot before stopping
-nav_view seems a bit unstable - ubuntu frequently grays it out thinking it's crashed
Thanks for the help,
-Dan