FFXI freezing at character creation screenFollow

hiii. i just installed the 30 day trial disc package on my machine;

AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 2.61GHz
2.75 GB DDR ram (1G,1G,512MB,512MB)
Nvidia 8500 GT 512MB VRAM

after a relatively painless install, i got to the character creation screen. it shows the male hume walking around and stuff, but when i try to change to another race/gender, the background scene goes black (aside from text) and doesn't load the next race. the game isn't frozen yet, i can actually go forward to faces and hair etc., but if i go back and try to change the race/gender a second time, THEN the game freezes (all the while the background remains black), and so far i haven't been able to close the application without doing a manual reboot.

after a while i just made a male hume to see if it would work, and it did, flawlessly o_O

despite this, i'd rather try a different race...

Edited, Sep 2nd 2008 4:59am by oohnomelon

ah thank you! that at least lets me pick different classes.