it would be wise not to patch.

Alright. I have no errors or database problems so I run world.exe and boot5zones.bat. I wait until the 5 zones are in sleep mode and i start game and login in with my account. I then click on my server (it is Up) and Click Play EQ.

Error 1017: Need to patch blah blah blah....

Not sure what to do because I followed the tutorial exactly as it said...minus the minilogin stuff becasue I want to host a server.

Any ideas?

When did you patch?

Do the patchme prompt so it doesn't patch, or use the eqwindows program.

Ok well I had several pms telling me to patch then dl another file so I patched and dled the other file and extracted it into my eq folder overwriting all files, then went in and changed the eqtext to my local machine for minilogin. Now i get no request to patch and I get to the server screen showing just mine, but when I connect to play now tells me that it had an unknown error. My screen looks just like in the tutorial. Did I miss a file somewhere?
Thanx John

I was able to get logged in after some work but now I have a new problem.
When I log in Freeport is fine. I can zone to any area in town. All rhe npcs are there and the newbie area outside is functioning. But when I zone to East commonlands the only thing visible is the sky. there is no land, trees, crits. Everything is a grey color. When I logout and try to login, the first attempt tells me zone not avail. then it will either boot me or send me to that zone still looking the same. I have sourced zone, zonecfg, and every other one I can find. What do I need to do to get this zoning prob fixed? Any help please let me know. Thanx.
John