If any of your characters has less than 224 experience, you can click on a person walking around, but you will not get any options to say to them. Also, the Close button won't work to end conversation, you'll have to hit escape. Since you'll always start with at least that much experience though, it doesn't really matter too much. What causes this, and whether it is intentional, I don't know.

If you're wondering why I edited a character to have less than that amount of experience, I just started a solo game, and edited my NPCs to show exactly how much quest experience was recieved, without combat experience.

Oh, and as aside, you'll also need to have at least 1 in each of your statistics (before effects of conditions/items), or the game will crash when you look at that character's stats sheet.