This week's hotfix obsoleted the Research Assistant amenity and many players are experiencing crashes due to UI files.

Today's EverQuest II hotfix introduced a change to the Research Assistant that no longer requires you to visit one in a city--instead, the service can be accessed from your Knowledge window. This alteration caused the guild hall Research Assistant amenity to no longer be functionable, but still take up an amenity slot and only give a 50% refund if sold back. After a discussion regarding this cropped up on the SOE forums, Greg "Rothgar" Spence was able to give a favorable response to the amenity change:

The proper thing to do from a customer service standpoint is to provide a refund of the amenity that has been phased out, so that's what I'm working on.  We want you to feel happy about your purchases and not worry about whether a game change in the future will invalidate the work you put in to obtain something, even if the change is for the positive.

So hang in there until next week's hotfix and the amenity should be refunded for you automatically.  The status and coin will appear in your house escrow account.

Another effect of the Research Assistant change was a modification to two of the UI files. This has caused many players with custom UIs to crash when attempting to load a character. To work around this issue, either see if your custom UI has been updated over on EQ2Interface or you can delete or rename the following files from your custom UI directory:

eq2ui_mainhud_knowledge.xml
eq2ui_mainhud.xml