I run a private server for some friends and since I updated it to 1.04 the server doesn't spawn any zombies. The only place i've seen a zombie since the patch was applied is at a heli crash site. The server is 100% vanilla, no mods at all (and it never had any mods) I've logged in with different accounts and restarted the server a few times without any change. (And no, i didn't wipe the server data after applying the patch. I would like to avoid it as far as I can since we would lose all the progress)

Apparently the problem was fixed after the latest patch was applied.

I haven't seen any animals either, but loot is still respawning... You mean that updating to 1.04 with steamcmd doesn't really update all the required files and I need to do some manual updating too? it doesn't really make much sense, wouldn't it be a common problem for every single server owner? and I don't see a lot of people complaining about this issue...

Thanks, I probably missed that part... is there a guide to do that?

Happens to me too. Since the last patch, LAN servers doesn't show in the server browser on the LAN tab. I think it's a bug and I have reported this to bohemia. In the meantime, if you wanna join your own server you can connect to it directly adding to your dayz client startup command the params -connect=<ip_address>:<port>