Almost every time my friend and I load in, the player joining loses his stats (all at 5 except for gear).

We've tried multiple work arounds, and the one that seems to work the most is unequipping all items from all characters, saving, going to main menu, and then reloading the game.

Lately that's stopped working also. My friend's PC isn't relatively new, so load times take 5+ minutes for every area. Very frustrating in combination with the aforementioned bug.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks!