Okay, so I installed the game with DosBox v0.74, and applied the v2.13 patch.

I've added "magicrepair 1" to z.cfg, but, aside from those changes I have a vanilla setup.

Started a new game, picked "Breton" as my race, generated a custom "Warlock" class, primary skills, Long Blade, Destruction, Restoration, major skills, Alteration, Mysticism, Illusion, misc, Thaumaturgy, Dodging, Running, Etiquette, Street Wise, and some other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head.

Anyways, I filled out the back story thing, picking things like 200 gold, or a Katana, added a special advantage of Increased Magery 3x, and that's all I can remember off the top of my head.

Now, to the issue, got in game with my new character(setup my controls, etc), but, the spell menu won't stay open, it closes on it's own, and shows no spells. (However, from the menu, I can click spellbook, and access them just fine.)

So, is this a bug, is it caused by some choice I made, I don't get it? (I googled around, found no mention of anything similar.)

I've of course tried various things, like, attempting to redo the character multiple times, etc,. (I even reinstalled once, because I had just installed a few mods, and wasn't sure if they were responsible, or not.)

Anyways, sorry about the lengthy description.

Any help would be appreciated.

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I messed around a bit, and tried not doing various things during chargen. (ie, making the same basic character, but skipping certain steps, etc,.)

Seems to be caused by something I chose during the questionnaire about my history? (Or by simply participating in it, on top of other choices I'd made. ?? At any rate skipping that part, seemed to fix the issue.)

I don't know, I got it working now, but, that's another odd issue to add to the list of DF bugs.

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For anyone else who might experience this issue.

It seems you can hold down the attack button(Mouse1 for me), and press the cast button(Mouse2 for me) while still holding the attack button, and this will make it start working again.

I should note, in this case I had triggered the same bug(same symptoms: menu closing by itself) by pressing the "Exit" button in the spell menu, this may, or may not work depending on how you triggered the bug.

It does work reliably in the above scenario.

Hope this info is helpful to someone.

This problem started happening again, after a bit of searching I came across the solution. (At least to the current iteration of the problem, it can be triggered multiple ways.)

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Key_Controls

You can see that it recommends NOT changing the default attack button, which I had, M1=Attack, M2=Cast, this was causing issues, by swapping that to, M1=Cast, M2=Attack, I was able to use my Spellbook properly again.

Thanks for posting that solution. I'll have to keep that in mind when I load it up. Ever since coming back to these forums, I've been having a real craving to load up Arena and Daggerfall again.