Freshly installed RIFT only shows a throne room

I wanted to play RIFT, but I can't get it to work. After installing it, the only thing I see is a throne room with a nice music. There's a cursor, but nothing else. No key seems to work, either.

I've tried the following:

1. Nuke & reinstall (multiple times, with re-download of 10+ Gib of "patch").
2. Restarting the computer.
3. Searching the RIFT forums, support and google in general. There's a mention of someone having similar problems, but that is a red herring.
4. Changing server, windowed mode.
5. Downloading (apparently) different versions of the bootstrap client (RIFT-Install-0-98lu20.exe and RIFT-Install.exe).
6. Accessing as a guest and as a registered user.
7. Made sure I have a working OS with enough horsepower

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX Gaming graphics 4095 MB Total available graphics memory
Primary hard disk 131GB Free (349GB Total)
Windows 8 Pro

I would assume there's a way of actually playing this game. Has anyone experienced this and found a way of fixing it?

Update 11-aug:

• Sometimes now I get flashing colored rectangles on the screen (a movie which plays in a broken way?). Pressing Esc sends me to the throne room.

• I've found a "Loading Screen Freeze" article on the NVidia support site, but it isn't very helpful and the suggested fix does not work at all.

• I've upgraded my NVidia drivers to the latest version. The drivers include a utility which automatically configures games to a supported standard. In my case it did discover RIFT and configured it. No change in behaviour.

I finally found out the answer through RIFT support. I needed to reinstall DirectX. This is counter intuitive, because I have a brand new, up to date, Windows 8 and the Direct X version is from 2010 or so.

In any case, this was their answer:

Thank you for contacting us regarding RIFT.

I apologize for the difficulty and frustration you've encountered when attempting to play Rift. It sounds as if you may be experiencing a Direct X issue. Please visit the following link as this should correct the issue you're experiencing.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=41&SrcFamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&SrcDisplayLang=en&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f1%2f7%2f1%2f1718CCC4-6315-4D8E-9543-8E28A4E18C4C%2fdxwebsetup.exe

If this does not resolve your issue, or if you have any additional questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let us know. Thank you for your continued support of Trion Worlds and for playing RIFT.

I hope this helps anyone else having the same problem.