I've heard connectivity problems can cause this, and lots of people have been experiencing weird hangups with the P99 servers lately (
https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=251917), which seem to be isolated to certain ISPs like AT&T. So I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility, however, if it isn't a connectivity issue then there are really only two possibilities:
1. You somehow messed something up with the patch, which is pretty hard to do, but people still manage to do it by extracting an old P99 patch, not extracting the patch to their main EQ directory, not clicking overwrite in the dialog, not restarting the client after extracting the patch, etc.
2. Your EQ installation is somehow broken by corrupted data, which of course can happen for too many reasons to write down - malware, failing hardware, an over-fragmented hard drive, accidentally deleting crucial files, etc. I would give EQ a full reinstall if you've exhausted all your options. And defrag regularly - more than 10% fragmented disk space = bad.