I'm playing POR and had made it into the castle, defeated the boss dragon/spirit and as the game was going thru the dialog, it froze on me. Now, since I was dumb and didn't save before entering the room, I had to go back and work my way back to him. The problem is, now it seems that the game doesn't want to let me get back to him. I am in the room with the stairs that lead up into the castle, but it never ask if I want to go up/down them, therefore making me stuck at almost the end.

Anyone have this happen before or possibly know of a way to fix this?

Never heard of this problem before.
But you could always try re-installing the game in a different directory, and copy over the save games, and see if that works.

I might give this a try. I'm just afraid that something happen to the save data itself and I'll have to start all over again. I like playing the game, but I mean starting all the way over can be a bit of a pain, especially since I had planned to play thru all of the games with this group of peeps.

Well installing/reisntalling elsewhere didn't work. But, luckily I had a save on my desktop that I originally transferred to my laptop, so I just copied it and fought thru a few more fights and now I have finished and moved on to CotAB.