I can always seem to get onto the game. My character always loads and comes into the game and everything, but when I move only a couple of steps, the game crashes and goes back to the background of the startup screen and says:

You have gone linkdead.
Your client stopped recieving messages from the server.
You have been disconnected

Press esc key to exit to windows.

Actually it's your client that crashes! The server is running fine. Renamed

Are you running a firewall? If so could you try to deactivate it? There already were some problems with firewalls in the past although I don't think it was as extreme as you describe. I remember a case where for some reason the player was able to connect but then the game wasn't able to receive server update packages (apparently sent on a port blocked by the firewall). This caused all other players, NPCs and monsters around her to simply disappear after a couple of seconds so that she was practically running in around in an empty landscape. After she disabled her firewall everything was fine.