Im not sure what to suggest I have almost no experience with 7.

What I would say is if you dont get a reply that helps from the forum launch a support ticket. Most of the users with experience of certain games tend to pop into the specific game forum every now and then so the general forum probably wouldnt help, but hell you've been here longer than me so you probably know all of what I just said. :-)

Have you tried downloading the utility at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=572BE8A6-263A-4424-A7FE-69CFF1A5B180&displaylang=en

Run the program labeled dxcpl.exe click on the direct draw tab and turn off hardware acceleration i had the same problem and this is the only way to turn off hardware acceleration in win7

Just wanted to post and thank Barfbagdx for his post, it's the only thing on the internet that helped me fix Icewind Dale 2. I tried the Compatibility Administrator fix and it didn't work for me, maybe because of my newer Nvidia card (who knows, I'm not even sure that makes sense, but I read it somewhere... whatever), but the DirectX SDK worked great, finished Prologue with no crashes or hiccups (also running some mods, tweaks, unofficial patches, etc, so the lack of crashes could be due to that). Multiple spells at once caused no slowdown, where previously my game would suddenly crawl just walking around an empty inn. Also, prior to running this my fog of war tiles had weird black squares around them, also gone after turning off hardware acceleration.

To help others, I will elaborate on Barfbagdx's advice:

Download the DirectX Software Developers Kit from the link posted above. It's like 500 meg, and only came down at about 300 kps for me, surprisingly slow considering the source... anyway, most of the file you don't need, I dunno if there's a smaller version without the "Samples" (which is like 90% of the file size and not needed to turn off hw accel), but that's on you.

So, download SDK, doubleclick it to execute it wherever it downloaded to (also on you), let it unzip to a temporary directory (as it prompts you; it will delete them at the end I believe), then the setup will start up. You DON'T need to install the 400 or so me of samples or examples or whatever, so you can uncheck that box. Click Install and let it install.

When it's finished, access your Start Menu programs (or whatever it's called now, the thing in the lower left), scroll to Microsoft DirectX SDK 2008 (or whatever you renamed it to, derp), you want to run , er, DirectX Control Panel in the DirectX Utilities folder. I have Win 7 64x but did NOT run the DirectX Utilities 64 bit version, and it worked fine. Maybe cause the game is 32 bit. Or maybe it doesn't matter, I dunno. So you click DirectX Control Panel, a window pops up, click the Direct Draw Tab (your screen will probably go black for a sec), and uncheck the little box that says Use Hardware Acceleration, then apply.

You should probably turn it back on when not playing Icewind Dale 2 (or whatever else you use it with; it seems pretty handy and I'm going to continue to explore its possibilities), I don't really know though. All I know is that this fixed my game on Win7 x64 with an Nvidia 460 gtx. Thanks again BarfBagdx.

Thanks you so much for your explanations hapexindustries :D

I had the same problems as you before and now the game runs perfectly !

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Thank you so much, hapexindustries, you've shown me how to completely fixed an issue that I NEVER would have figured out how to fix.

It worked for me 100%. It's fun again!

Another thank you to hapexindustries and BarfBadgx!!!

Still, can't believe that this problem exists in the first place - such a convoluted work around to get this fixed.

Yet another thank you to hapexindustries and BarfBadgx! I had the same problem and am now playing IWD2 and it's performing just like the other BG series games, much more enjoyable.

You guys rock!

http://bitpatch.com/ie_ddrawfix.html

Disables hardware acceleration ONLY on the game it is applied to.
Is only a 1.5 MB download
Easier to use.

Thanks a bunch, guys!

Turning off hardware acceleration in dxcpl helped me as well with low FPS in IWD, it also got rid of some graphical corruption that I had with the fog of war. :)

I found this patch very useful. The animation is now silky smooth on my Windows 8 64-bit machine.

I turned off hardware acceleration, but my game still likes to lag when I am walking in an empty room. I'm using windows 7 64 bit. Am I doing anything wrong? I am running the game at 1024x768.

It will run very smoothly for a few seconds, in combat, but it just decides to slow right down, and then go back to being smooth. Can anyone help me?

This worked perfectly for me (Win7, 64 bit). No need for that huge Microsoft download, and is also reversible because it's a WeiDU patch.

Thanks, aqrit .

Brilliant, worked for me. Neither IWD 1 nor IWD 2 ran at all on my set up, simply going non-responsive and hiding the mouse on the right-hand side of the screen. I'm using 64bit Windows 7 and a Toshiba TV as a monitor (which could also be a source of the problem...). After using this patch and taking option 1] on the install screen, I can run IWD2 (I got IWD 1 running by enabling the 'Use Open GL 3D Acceleration' option in IWD 1's config utility).