To summarize the last days and other threads about the same topic (wasn\'t this ones title obvious enough?!):
The missing character animation was fixed by (re-)moving outdated DLL files, which were not detected by the updater to be outdated (for whichever reason).
I had to keep at least the following DLLs to allow the updater to work at all (either Windows told me a DLL is missing in the PATH, or the updater could not process files without them):
- vfs.dll
- libz-cs.dll
- libcurl.dll
- xmltiny.dll
- xmlshader.dll
- xmlread.dll
All other DLLs could be (re-)moved before running the updater in recovery mode.