I have been staring at the getting characters screen for the last half an hour, incapable of logging in (I do press cancel and try again every few minutes).

I can ping the game servers just fine, and the rest of the Internet is also working OK for me. Something odd is going on.

The only related thing I can think of is that my RAID array is currently saturating my gigabit card's upstream... is there anything special about VO packets that would result in them being dropped either by the local network stack (in preference to TCP NFS packets) or by a switch that is feeling somewhat overwhelmed?

It used to be possible to get stuck there if you clicked through the eula really fast. Maybe your loaded system just makes it easier to trigger.

Completely restarting the game might help.. if you haven't done that.

Restarting the game is what fixed it, thanks!

Please keep the blatant trolling out of Bugs.

Yes. That is completely unhelpful.