Your best bet is to have a fresh install of the games. Im unsure if being patched to january of 2011 will stop you. Dosent hurt to give ti a try honestly. Just change the EQhost.txt and give it a shot. If you bought digital copies of the game im sure you can get it back depending on where you got it. If you have the CD's from buying the game id look into finding it.
But depending on the client you use i would reccomend Seeds of Dectruction. More contend available and alot of servers do use it. Ill link to a post where a few members of the comminity talked a little about which they preffered Sof over SoD
Posted in Trevius's post he linked a good wiki page on all the clients you can look there for any questions you have about which one is better.
So look into redownloading those digital copies SoD i believe is 100% functional.
Good luck
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=34250