Empty, unpopulated world glitch

I was playing in Central Shroud as a botanist, when my character's gather animation started acting weird. The arms would move, but the scythe wasn't in his hands and no gather sound effect would play. I tried changing character classes, and all my equipment disappeared entirely, and my skills wouldn't work. I then noticed that there were no player characters anywhere, and all the NPCs and mobs were gone. I figured that zoning would reload everything, but when I approached the entrance to Gridania, my character "hit a wall" about 15 yalms from the entrance blue dots. Panicking, I tried to teleport into Gridania, and my screen faded black and then nothing. I couldn't access any menus or commands. I pressed <alt>+<F4>, and it asked if I wanted to exit. I clicked yes, and nothing happened. After a few minutes and several attempts later, I minimized the game and force closed the game client and rebooted my computer.
Now when I log in, it launches the game client, but where you click "start" (the main menu where the options are start, opening movie, configuration, and exit), start is disabled and won't let me click it. I assume it thinks I'm already logged in, or still logged in from before.
Any suggestions?

Had something similar happen to me last night right after turning in a quest. The music started sounding kind of glitchy then I was unable to see NPC's and 99% other players, it was weird cause I could see one or two players running around sometimes, but not the massive amounts of players you normally see in cities.

It's called lag. Most likely your connection to their sever is slow or stuttering when that happened.
Not much you can do if it is slow internet except wait it out.

Well, maybe the connection was slow, but if so it was on the server side. I have 50 meg cable, and I've never seen it go below 30-40 megs even during the highest usage times. I was able to log back in about 10 minutes after posting them, so that's good. I didn't think to point to the connection info and see what it said. If this ever happens again, I'll be sure to check that first. My brother got disconnected while transitioning between zones today as well, and that's never happened before to us either. It sounds like minor glitches on SE's side. Hopefully after the server upgrades, all of this will be resolved.

Riktus, did your connection come back ok on its own, or did you have to log our and in again?

Overall, I'm very happy with the game. I can understand having way more people sign up for your game than expected and having capacity problems at launch. Thankfully this will all be resolved eventually, and then nobody will even care that they had issues at the start. Really, it is a compliment to SE that the game is so popular!