Was going to start a new tread, but stumbled upon this one, similar to what I've encountered. Although it's not only "when game starts" for me.
The issue is that my character wanders off the screen, eight steps through the void till the actual map scrolling happens.
The way to reproduce: enter Terinyo (which brings me near the right corner of the village, with a character on the right side of the screen), and then save/quit/reload, which makes my @ to be centered on. After that a hero can go over the left edge and be invisible (even to me), attachment included.
Fix: running on 64-bit Windows 7