MannTec: I had the exact same issue as the op playing NWN2. Lenovo i7, NVIDIA card, Windows 8 64-bit. Even running the game in windowed mode produced the same crash.
Here is my fix, try it on computers with separate graphics processors (eg. Intel and NVIDIA/ATI):
1. Open the NVIDIA control panel.
2. Under the select a task tree menu select 'Manage 3D settings'.
3. Select the Program Settings tab in the right window pane.
4. Using the dropdown '1. 'Select a program to customize' select Neverwinter Nights 2 (nwn2.exe). If its not there you may have to add the exe.
5. Using the dropdown '2. Select the preferred graphics processor for this program:' select Intergrated graphics.
I still get bad animation studder, but it is one step closer to a playable game.
Update:
Simply restarting the computer fixed the animation problem, so now I am happily playing NWN2 with no problems! I hope this helps someone else getting the game running on newer systems.
Thank you very much. I've had the same problem (same or similar Lenovo laptop btw), tried re-installing the game, tried forcing the NVIDIA GPU, but didn't even think about running NWN2 on integrated Intel graphics. Thanks again for the working solution!
UPD: Restarting didn't help me with animation stutter, so in case anyone gets the same problem, here's what helped - Client Extension: