As the title says, I'm unable to start the game. I get the Atari logo, and then the game crashes. I tried running in compatibility mode with windows 98, but that didn't help.
Any suggestions what to do? :/

You shouldn't have to run with windows 98 compatibility mode as the game is very much compatible with windows XP.

However...did you try this?:
- Download and install the 1.69 critical rebuild patch from http://nwn.bioware.com/support/patch.html

(^ shouldn't be necessary if you downloaded it recently, I believe)

Did you try not starting it from the launcher but directly from nwn.exe?
EDIT: nwnmain.exe, not nwn.exe. You want to start without the launcher.

starting from nwn.exe can cause tons of other problems, I would try right clicking on the shortcut for it and adding a -nointro or -skipintro (I don't remember which it is...). This may help.

If installing the patch didn't work maybe this:

- In nwn.ini set Safemovie=1

I don't know if it causes problems for everyone, but there was a thread awhile back in which it caused severe crashes and some strange things in the menu. If you want more specifics you can look it up, I think it is still on the first or second page...

Found it.
GAH. I meant NWNMAIN.EXE. stupid, stupid me! NWN.exe still loads the launcher. You want to try to start the game without the launcher.

What type of video card do you have?

I have the same issue here, and I've tried everything in several threads and nothing works.
I had this game installed on Vista and it worked fine, but I recently got a new hard drive and when I reinstalled NWN, it now crashes on startup every time right after the Atari logo comes up.

I've updated my graphics card driver, and it's not the card itself since this worked fine on a different OS.

Can anyone offer anything else?

Thanks!