Weird, I've only had one GOG game not work in 11 years (Zork Grand Inquisitor). Maybe a ghost haunts your PC.

I take it that you haven't played Gorky 17?

I saw a recent fix for that one... Haven't tried yet though

Temple of Elemental Evil isn't supported in Windows 10. Now you probably know why.

https://www.gog.com/game/the_temple_of_elemental_evil
"Works on: Windows (7, 8)"

Also your GPU (Intel Graphics) may be a problem for some games.
Good to know though that it can be run also on Windows 10, even if it needs a third-party mod for that.

Anyway, generally speaking that is PC gaming for you. Lots of games and things don't (fully) work out of the box, especially when we are talking about running older games in Windows 10. Little tweaking is necessary here and there. Also for your claim that you never have similar issues in e.g. Steam, I claim that is because you don't try to play such problematic old games on Steam service, like you do on GOG. So you are comparing apples to oranges.

If you want a fully "works out of the box" experience, then your only option is either gaming consoles or streaming gaming services like Google Stadia, Microsoft StreamingGamingServicesMegaExperience, Amazon PlayAnywhereOhYeah! or Valve's upcoming SteamStreamHahaGedit?.

Then again, those options give you less freedom compared to PC gaming (like the ability to play old games, or even games originally made for completely other platforms), but those are the choices you have.

When it comes to (older) GOG games, generally they work much better out of the box on my Windows 7 PC, and quite often need something to work on Windows 10. Some examples (these work out of the box on Windows 7 IIRC):

Icewind Dale 2: in Windows 10 I need to use "ddwrapper" with the game, otherwise the scrolling would be very jerky and there would be some graphics problems like the well-known "jaggy fog of war"-bug. I wouldn't be surprised you still have these issues too, even if you think the game is running "fine". (dgVoodoo2 might work just as well, as ddwrapper)

Might & Magic 9: I need to use dgVoodoo2 with the game, otherwise I can't see anything underwater.

Two Worlds Epic Edition: The intro videos etc. are missing in Windows 10, on Windows 7 they play fine. I am quite sure the Steam version has this issue too, unless it has been just fixed.

Thank you! And yeah. I must have just seen a "windows icon" and figured it had to be backwards compatible with 10. I abhor Win 10 (but need it for business). It has some benefits (like better core usage), but I hate the SAS model. Running Dragon Age direcctly from the directory in compatability mode worked. I actually have Dragon Age through the EA Origin app (on a different PC), but I'd rather use GOG. The one that caused my baffling rage was Dragon Age (since I wouldn't consider it retro); I found work-arounds for Icewind dale & ToEE (so I was able to get them to work, but they didn't work as downloaded) ... from other replies, it seems some of the issue lies with the GOG Galaxy front-end. Those worked only after using 3d party work-arounds ... surprisingly, the only one that DID work was Icewind Dale (which is not supposed to run on Win 10).

Greaat point. It seems my problem is mostly the GOG Galaxy front-end.

I have the (20+ year old) CD somewhere, but this laptop doesnt have a CD player . . . I figured it was cheaper to just pay $5.00 as opposed to hunt for the CD , create an image, load it in a virtual drive, etc. I didn't want to spend a whole day trying to save 5 bucks!

Actually, if the GOG version which is already patched to work better on modern systems, doesn't work on your end out of the box, then the CD version is guaranteed to not work. What I meant to say was that ToEE was buggy even after applying all the official patches, and only with the Circle of Eight mod was it ever stable for me.

I even remember that there were community attempts to develop a custom engine for the game, but searching now seems that there has been little headway in that direction.

Would you mind sharing what that fix is? Last I tried to play the game a few years ago the game was unplayable due to messed up graphics in game.

GOG updated the game a few weeks ago to make it work on W7 to 10

Ah, okay thank you for the info. Will check it out.

Fair. I probably did lash out in frustration.

It happens....have a good one/good holiday season, at any rate.

It worked on my old laptop (Win-7 32bit with Intel integrated graphics) but not my new one (Win-10 64bit nVidia GTX 1050Ti), but that was before the update, and I really wasn't that interested to test it.