Hi vinayakgole,
Just wanted to say THANKS for posting your solution. Saved me a huge amount of time.
I just discovered this problem yesterday. Not only was I getting a sitemap error in Webtools, Google completely stopped crawling my site around 12/25/09. My traffic has slowly dropped off to about half, and since it’s an e-commerce site that really hurts. 🙁
But de-activating the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, and manually putting up a sitemap instead, fixed the problem. Google is crawling my site again, so hopefully it won’t take too long to repair the damage.
I really hope a fix is found soon for the Sitemaps plugin, though. It sure is great when it works.
