I started playing this game again by installing on my steam account. All was fine for a few days and then the troubles began. A new character was missing the quest bar. The equipment paperdoll turning black except for the equipped items, same for possession beast. And lastly, today I couldn't see anything in the chat box except for linkable items. All this because corrupt install.
What I did:
Uninstalled the Steam version, and installed the standalone client.
Turned off the antivirus.
Installed latest windows updates.
Gave it permissions in firewall.
Ran as administrator.
Downloaded the installer through IE (did a bit of forum search)
Deleted the ACTORS. VDK file that was stopping the full check, and ran repair, several times.
All of the above in any possible combination and more.
Nothing helped and I'm about to give up because I really don't know what else to do. I played this game before without absolutely no trouble, that's why I returned. At the moment I'm installing the steam version again, but this time not gonna bypass steam. If Steam's not working, I'm pretty much done.