I decided to try out the 14 day trial so I just downloaded and installed for the first time. Everything seemed to work fine, switched to IE and copy/pasted the login url and was able to go through the web based character creation stuff and everything patched. It then gets to the splash screen and I get a message on the last line saying Retrieving New Character Essence. That starts out with a series of .'s moving next to it but eventually those stop and the system just sits there. I've let it sit on that screen for a solid 15 minutes with nothing changing before I ended the process.

After reading through these forums I'm beginning to suspect one of two things, either my SoundBlaster Audigy or the fact that I have .Net 2.0. I'm wondering if anyone can confirm this.

Removing the sound card might be an option but I doubt it, if a game that is this far past release can't support the most common audio card on the market I can't see myself paying to play it. Downgrading to .Net 1.1 is definatly not an option as I need 2.0 for work related tasks.

Thanks