You should not have to do anything but patching (after you completed the "how to play eqemu"-tutorial)
So that is kinda weird. Though i had the same problem with my game. And when i connected to for instance Green Leaf, it worked perfectly. So perhapps you and your friend had diffrent versions of the patch, you for instance he has the May 5 patch and you have one earlyer...
I dont know how a server react in the character creation screen if the server is full of players at the time. Like, if there are for instance
20 players on the server and the server only can handle 20 plp...you get the point. Though i doubt that is the issue though
Otherwise i have no clue what the issue may be, sorry :cry: