Welp here's what finally fixed it. I had to remove Warband from Steam, and then removed Steam. Restarted and STEAM folder was now gone. I removed the warband saved games from my documents. don't think there was any other programs warband or steam related on the PC. Went through the registry and deleted almost everything STEAM related (I skipped the "Class" folder under HKLC). Deleted everything Warband related.
I'm pretty sure something in the registry had kept some old settings, because the first time I thought i removed everything, when I went into Multiplayer (both native and crpg) it had an old character name and old character face from years ago listed there.
Either way I installed steam, warband (launched game) and then crpg and now it's working fine. Cool side note, the game looks a lot better now too, apparently I had some other graphics settings turned off or down before.