The fact that your fighter's picture changes is not a good sign. It is a bug, but not in the game. This indicates that your files are corrupted. This happens sometimes upon installation under WinXP or Win2k. The changing pictures is a small problem. Eventually the game will become unplayable.

I suspect that this corruption is caused by anti-virus software, but I really don't know. If you would like to help investigate that, write me at telphelp@yahoo.com. I will need to see a directory listing of your installation and can help you with that if you need it.

Once we figure out what's causing the corruption you can re-install, but it is possible (likely, I think) that the picture will not revert. There *might* be other unnoticed changes as well, but I think that you should be OK just to re-start from a save made before the promotion.