Problems getting FFXI to work - help!

[Bridgebury]

Up until a week ago, I had been playing a copy of ffxi that my fiance had downloaded for me because he had an extra CD key. The expansion packs weren't working, and we couldn't figure out why. So we decided to fix it by just buying a copy from steam and re-install and hopefully get it to work that way.

Of course, that started a whole host of problems. First, I forgot to uninstall the old ffxi before installing the new, so had get rid of everything and download it again. Then playonline wouldn't work, my fiance decided I had to wrong playonline for my computer, so we changed that. Then windower wouldn't work, and after playing around with it for a bit, I realized that it was when the plugins were loading that it was crashing, and so I stopped the plugins from loading.

Now, from either clicking on playonline or starting up windower, I can get into the game, select my character and load into port jeuno. It's taken me a week of frustration and hell to get to this point.

But now, when I load in, it works fine for about 10 seconds, except that I can't see anything that anyone types in chat. No linkshell chat, not shouts, no tells, nothing. I keep seeing just : and a blank line or [GM]: and a blank line. And the game slows and finally freezes until I have to bring up the task manager to exit because I can't even type in the command to /shutdown. It becomes completely unresponsive.

My computer is a Dell XPS 15z running windows 7, with an NVidia GeForce GT 525 M video card.

Please, help. What did I do wrong, why won't this game work, and what should I do to fix it?

[Tekki]

Turns out, HDD was shot