On Vista, this game has a tendency to lose sync between the video and audio. This is most notable during the intro, which makes it play out kind of weird.
Luckily, it's a trivial fix. Open up SettingsApplication.exe, go to Advanced Settings, choose "Manual compatibility settings", and untick "HW Vertex Processing". Boom, sync issues are gone.

I'm sorry, man. But to play without "HW Vertex" is really a pain in the ass. Especially in the city framerate becoming so shitty.

Weird, I never noticed any framerate issues with it turned off. What card are you using?

Yup, I have the same problem - without HW Vertex it's lag city. I'm using a 8800 gts - could it be that particular card causing the problems?

Just check STEAM forum for the BGE... Everyone have same problem.

Honestly, I doubt it -- I have an 8800GT myself. I suppose it could be some sort of driver issue -- those are updated, I take it?

With HW Vertex off you MUST have weird fps in the city and also poor water.
AFAIK, for SYNC thing helps putting game process to one core in the task manager.
Default+HW Vertex ON and AntiAliasing OFF as for flickering issue... And bam... More fun =)

This is one solution to the sync problem:
*See next post*
Start the app, it will be "idle", hit start, then launch BG&E.
It worked with the steam version for me on Vista 32.
Oh, and I realize downloading a single executable from a strange link seems suspicious, but trust me, it's not malware. All it does is use up some spare processor power or something which lets BG&E run at the correct syncronization.

I wrote that app :) Here's its page on my website:
http://theunusualsuspect.com/software/process
The source code is available as well (Delphi Win32).
It probably won't solve all problems but it certainly improved audio/video sync for me and a few others. Just bear in mind that when it's running in its "Processing" state, it will try and use 100% of your CPU. So don't leave it running for extended periods of time.

Thanks so much. I've removed my "unofficial" link.
Again, thanks for the sweet app. It completely solved my problems.

Man, this is disappointing. I thought like the whole point of GoG is that I can get old games and have them just work, right out of the box, on a modern OS?
Now I find out the GoG version has a big bug, one that's been known about since the original PC release? I'm glad there are outside solutions available, but running my CPU at 100% for hours on end doesn't strike me as being a good time. Glad I read this before spending my $10, though. Guess I'll just have to bring out my PS2 whenever I want to replay this classic.
If this can't be fixed, they really need to note it on the game's page.

Thank you for the program, it does indeed work. But has anyone else noticed the run.exe that launches with BG&E in the GOG version? It seems to be designed to do the exact same thing (I notice it takes up extra processor cycles unused by BG&E). I think GOG probably tried to address the issue by implementing this solution.

seb2net & StormEffect: Glad it helped :) ...
I've removed the evilshare.com link from my post (probably shouldn't have left it there in the first place!). It would be awesome if you would remove it from where you've quoted my post as well - that way everyone will get the file from the original source along with all the info/instructions/warnings etc...

I'm pretty disappointed by this release as well. Just spent an hour trying to get things working. Graphical glitches, voice sync issues, and when I did finally get to the first Save point, the game froze. This release is not up to GOG's standard for compatibility. They should have worked on this one a bit longer before releasing it. I hope they're going to try to resolve these issues for us :)

It took me only one tweak to get things working because I can overlook the voicesync issues for the few cutscenes that have a problem. Overall it is running great after playing it for about 5 hours with no freezing and it still looks good for a game that was released 5 years ago. I think the two major issues are the greaphical stuff which for me was cause by anti-aliasing and the voice sync, which to me is minor. The freezing seems to be more based on your computer settings, which I don't know why it would.
With other GOG releases I had to tweak multiple things, but all were pretty easy fixes, like this release.