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[Scatty]

What do you mean, you couldn't speak to them properly? They didn't talk with you? It's usually best if you select the WarWizard (I) to talk to people, some mercenaries in your party could, for example, only speak Halfling and therefore couldn't talk with human NPC's. Maybe you had one such mercenary selected for talking.
Usually both rulers of a city have some interesting hints to say. It doesn't matter as much though if they for some reason don't, it's only hints about something you can find out in dungeouns for yourself, anyway. And yes, you should be able to complete the game without talking to anyone, as long as you know what you have to do. Keys are important for special doors or chests, but can be dropped after they've been used. Better stash them all in one chest somewhere, though, to find them again if necessary.

Are you playing the game in DosBox? If yes, which version, 0.74? Did you follow the advise about saving games in my first post in this thread? When you save the game, you should do it alternately in different slot than you saved before, i. e. you saved in slot 1 before, later save in slot 2, and sometime later when you need to save again do it in slot 1.
If you save all the time in only 1 slot repeatedly, the game doesn't save everything entirely in that savegame slot, and if you load a game after that, bugs and crashes might appear. I'm not sure exactly why the game behaves like this, but I think it has to do with the caching DosBox (or maybe Windows itself on lower level) does, as it had the same issues back then in Ms-Dos when Smartdrive (a caching program) was loaded.