All toons and mobs pure black..
 

After downtime today I've logged in to see pure black avatars and mobs on both character select screen ( with the exception of hand held items) and in world...any ideas?

Still unplayable, If I reinstall will I lose my current toons?

No, but you may lose saved settings like UI.

Thanks for reply. Losing UI settings is ok but I was hoping someone had some idea why everything was black before i think about a reinstall to play...

What OS are you using? Have you updated your drivers lately, especially your graphics? I understand it was working prior to downtime, but it could just be funky timing or something has changed within your system files during downtime which coincidentally is effecting your game play.

XP... radeon 4800 card, drivers are up to date ;(

Well I've found a few other posts with the same problem but none of them mention a fix...

Try reinstalling your RenderEffects folder.

How?

Try one of these things:

Disable Texture Caching
Disable Advanced Lightning
Disable Shadows

Not sure they will help, but I've seen/heard some interesting graphic anomalies occur and some of these helped people fix them.