basically. I played for about an hour today, after getting my beta key yesterday, and came across what I think is a town of some sort. I saw a few boxes outside the fence so I decided to see what was in them. when I got close, the salem client (I'm using the official one) suddenly returned me to the login screen as though I'd just started the game. and when I tried to log in again (thinking disconnects happpen, so it was likely something to do with that) I was surprised to learn that my account was still logged in. so, as I'd read somewhere that it'd help, I terminated javaw.exe with taskmanager and tried to log in.
that worked, up to the character selection screen. when I click on play for the character I hear a 'ping' sound and the screen flickers, but I'm returned to the login screen. the sound is not the windows error sound or like it, and I think it's connected to the game.
EDIT:
this has also happened to a new character I made while waiting for a reply to this, it seems to be related to walking against the edge of a claim.
further edit:
it has now also spread to just making new characters upon trying to interact with the ship in the dock. reinstalled the game by flushing the java cache did not solve the problem. this is seriously game-breaking.
it's not just my computer. I've tried the same thing on a laptop, using both java 6 and 7 and it's always the same outcome. back to login screen with a ping sound upon clicking the play button under any of my three characters.