In Installation..

[fauxreigner]

I didn't have any problems like this when I followed the instructions in the "Getting Started" post. From what you're saying it sounds like you might be trying to connect to the wrong server or maybe you allowed the client to patch when you ran it; however, I'm not particularly good at troubleshooting these kinds of things if the following the instructions doesn't work.

What does your eqhost.txt file look like and what is the target for the shortcut that you use to launch the game?