I'm not Dramamama, but in an effort to allow you to keep your focus on your particular area of expertise, I'll take a shot at explaining it.
First of all, let's clarify what we are talking about. These "openhand" and "closedhand" files are not maps and they are not something that a user would typically be saving themselves. When you are in Google Maps with IE and not clicking on anything, your cursor is an arrow. Then, when you click on the map and start dragging it around, your cursor will change to a little picture of a closed hand.
The picture of that closed hand is what is in the closedhand.cur file (the name of the file is actually closedhand_8_8.cur for IE8). That's all this file is. Just a picture of a closed hand.
The first time you click and drag on the map, Google actually goes across the Internet and gets that little picture from a Google site called maps.gstatic.com. For IE8, it gets the closed hand picture from here:
http://maps.gstatic.com/intl/en_us/mapfiles/closedhand_8_8.cur
Now, Google Maps doesn't want to have to keep going across the Internet to get the little picture of the hand every time you click+drag on the map, so it caches a copy of the picture on your computer. When you subsequently click+drag on the map, it uses that cached picture of the hand. On my Win7 system with IE8, the cached version of the little picture is a .bmp file. I didn't ask it to save it in that format, it just did it. I would assume that it did the same thing with whatever version of Windows and IE that BC had.
I have attached a screen grab of what Windows file properties shows for the closedhand_8_8.cur file on my system. Notice that the name it shows for the actual file is the .cur one out on the Internet at maps.gstatic.com. But, below that, it says that the Cached name is closedhand_8_8[1].bmp.
I assume that the cached file is what they were talking about in court. The create date on it would be the time that it was downloaded from maps.gstatic.com and the cache file was saved. Presumably, the access time would be the last time the closed hand was loaded. So, not the last time you dragged. It's the last time you changed the cursor from the arrow to the closed hand. So, the last time you did click+drag.
If the question was how the create time and access time would be the same on the cached file, it seems like it would mean that you clicked+dragged on a map to make it switch to the closed hand cursor, dragged the map around, then released the mouse button and never did click+drag again.
