Had this happen last night. I started a new game and it seemed all the quests flags for dialogue were not reset.
Guards at the bridge didn't care about me. I was able to ask about the 'Staff' all over town, Evelyn had run off, etc.
I was able to fix this by deleting all my saved games and restarting a new game. I also restarted multiple games after this where I hadn't saved, and there seemed to be no problem, iirc. I'm going to test this more tonite after work.
