Have you tried inserting the Foreign Characters Bug Patch? It's located in the Bug Patches section of the first post.
Also, for your request to allow walking when the text box is open... how would you want to work that? Would you still be able to interact with other events. If the text box was over a character, would is move with them, etc... I'm not overly opposed to the idea, but there are a lot of factors involved that I'd need to know before I could do it.