Someone had this problem a while back and I think the problem was with corrupted character information.
Exit out of the game completely. Navigate to the installation directory for the game. Open the folder with your username. Delete the playerslots.txt file that is in this folder.
Relaunch the game. It should now let you get the character list. Your characters will be in the default slots and you can move them around if you want to. The playerslots.txt file will be recreated when you do this.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
Thanks for the help. The problem was with bitdefender
Game loads ok and I can sign and pick my server. But game wont go past Retrieving Charactor List form server. Game stops responding. Tried trainng server and get the same thing