Ok guys. I have read the entire forum about bugs and suggested fixes. Each fix took me one step closer to everything working, but not quite.
Ok so i had the standard problems (uog says no client, patches not downloading, etc.) and i started the attempts to fix them. I replaced my "uog.rar" with a good, working one. I went into uog properties and changed the option to "run as administrator". I went into "shards.xml" and edited the UO clients to show mondane's legacy. I made sure there are no spaces after the dns/ip and port in custom shard listings. I even tried un-installing and re-installing UOML and UOG in different orders. Nothing worked completely.
With everything i tried, the furthest i got was the 4 client patches downloaded from sylvandreams. When the client tries to start up to play the game, i get an error window. It says there's an error with client.exe and it must close.
So since i tried every fix listed here and nothing fixed it, i started messing around. I found out that i can get everything to work if i just delete the client.exe PATCH that uog downloads to play at sylvandreams. However, sylvandreams server won't let me onto the game unless i have the client.exe patch....
That's all i have effort to try for now. If anyone has any helpful advice, or better yet, a link to Samurai Empire client download--it would be much appreciated.
Chances are you are patched too far with OSI. Try reinstalling and patching up to bout 5.06 with OSI and see if that helps.
Many thanks for the advice Thane. Your conjecture was extremely helpful. I ended up doing a system restore on my computer, then a re-install of UOG then UOML. I patched UOML to 5.0.0b (the second patch from the original client) and it was compatible with the shard client.exe patch. So now everything works!
I had previously tried patching to 5.0.6 but it was too new to be compatible with the shard patch. So for anyone else in the future with this problem...
If you can connect through uogateway and download the shard patches, but your client.exe crashes before the game can start--this means your OSI client patch is not compatible with the shard patches. It seems (at least for me) patch 5.0.0b is a good place to stop patching. Btw just to be clear i have WindowsXP with Mondane's Legacy.
Yes, in some cases this is caused by having too high OSI patches.
However, not everyone will have this issue..
I have been just fine using the latest OSI patches and connecting using UOGateway and/or ConnectUO while running Windows XP as well as Windows Vista.
i never had this issue till last time. But this time i did had to sacrafice a few thingsi cant see in game but am able to play now.