Glad you managed to eventually fix it!
To be honest I kind of like that CCP left this bug in the game.
Back when CCP changed the new character panel they forgot to add a button to hide the character. People repeatedly asked for such a button (no reason to strain lower end PCs rendering a moving character) but no response. Then people figured out how to hide the character by themselves with this bug. There’s never been any acknowledgement of the request nor of the existence of the bug, but I see it as a feature.
For whoever stumbles upon this thread in search of either hiding the character in the character panel or in search of making it visible again, here’s how to do it:
The default look of the Character panel
You can drag the character panel into another window, for example the Character Information sheet:
This results in a simplified character panel without your character:
Of which you can rightclick and close the other tab so you’re left with only a simplified Character Sheet:
And to get your character back again all you need to do is to click the Character Sheet tab and drag it out of the window:
I think it’s a pretty useful feature, I’ve used it before.