ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

In Grushnak Pride (guarded barracks), when I enter a fearscape portal (instead of just destroying it), I get the death-plane starfield and a mouse cursor, but no UI or tiles visible. If I hover where my hotkeys would be, I see tooltips for my skills, but nothing happens. Even hitting escape doesn't ...

I also bought the game on steam (and loving it), but when I try to add any item to the vault, this message appears:

Error while transferring Borfast's Cage (10 def, 15 armour) to the online item's vault, please retry later.