This erasing-80-characters-thing is a workaround needed because of the way the game is currently handling the “.sav” file.
Mirthal recently indicated that this behaviour would change in the near future, so you may want to wait some more. In case you don't feel so inclined: Chances are that you are not performing the actions described in the wiki correctly. Most often than not, people are copying the first
79 characters of their own save, then they erase the first
79 characters of someone else's save, resulting in an incorrect .sav file. You may want to triple-check that.
In case you still don't have any success, please provide the 3 following “.sav” files: one from a save performed on your own system, the resulting one after you performed the erasing-80-characters-thing and, optionally, the one from the save you want to use.