I bought it from Gamers Front... the store advertised on this website. Admittedly, the package was a bit sketchy since it came as a shrink-wrapped manual and cd, but I'm given to believe that this is as official as it gets.
I must scratch my head though... why would that be the deciding factor in what's wrong?
One of the Copy Protections of the game hamstrings the UI in a variety of ways, making it disappear etc.
In some cases when people have had issues, they just had to reenter their cd-key correctly (or so I read in a similar thread earlier this month)