So I decided to return to the game after a few years away from playing on a private server (and over a decade from retail)
I was having issues getting Windower/###### to load on XP, so I upgraded to Windows 7. Followed the instructions and couldn't get the game to load (PoL worked fine, but when I press "Play" PoL disappears, as if loading the game, but then just has the PoL screen lad back to where it was.
So with nothing better to do I uninstalled the game and reinstalled, when I did this and tried to log on everything went fine. I got on to my old character (thanks to the free week) and played around a bit.
Wanting to play on a DST server I installed the patch, backing up my old files, and did a file check, but like before now the game doesn't load. I replaced with my original files, file checked again, and still the game itself doesn't work.
So it seems the patch is breaking my game. Do I need to install this or is there a known work around?