@Chortles
Are you familiar with the Security Center(not sure if that's what it's called), in your control panel? There's a page there called Quarantine and I wan't you to see if the azp.exe got stuck in it. If it is add it to the exception list. If not, check your anti-virus and firewall as well. Since you're certain the patch files got copied to your game directory, there must be someting preventing them from beeing run in your installation directory, otherwise you wouldn't have any problems. Others have reported similar problems and have gotten it to work, maybe checking the old threads to see what they did to resolve th issue.
It seems that my attempt to fix the cheater chop inventories failed, but I've made a new fix that might work:
http://rapidshare.com/files/40349500...1.01_Fix_2.rar
Just copy the files to your game directory and delete all the files in the RenderedItems folder before starting the game.
@Ninja2dan
Apeiron seems to be offline, so contacting them is almost impossible. Here's a link to their forum, if they ever come up again:
http://apeiron-games.ru/forum/index.php
The guy who was most helpful, Snowie, has left the company and the other guys never answered any queries, so I'd say it's almost impossible to contact them. You could try asking over at the HLA site, they know much more about the game than anyone and might be able to help you.