can't get quest from castlen drewe in PoK

[eski2]

I can get my newbie Kobold skull charm from Arias in the tutorial and other tasks there seem ok, and other quests seem to be working normally. I have the svn setup and i checked it's updated (at revision 587, it says).

Castlen drew says "Greetings and welcome. I have been compiling reports from all over Norrath! There are many odd jobs to be done by someone like you. Would you be interested in such a [quest]?" correctly, then ignores any variation of a sentence with the word quest.