Windows 7 32bit, realMyst installs and the intro video seems to work perfectly.
After clicking on the Myst book at the end of the intro, the book animates its pages flipping open and trails of pages appear, the animation smearing a number of partly open and fully open pages as it attempts to animate but fails. It kind of works in that the window with the quicktime movie showing the arrival on Myst to the starting postion starts to try to play and the sound for it can be heard, but the video mostly doesn't appear (it has only once so far) amidst the messy display of the book. Once done, the mouse lags badly, but you can click on the video and appear at the dock. All appears to be well - you appear on Myst.

However, turn left and click on the door at the dock, you hear the sound accompanying the opening animation, but the animation fails, screen gets corruption in the animation, the mouse disappears and you have to end task in the task manager to get back to the desktop.

Not much of an adventure so far...

Any ideas about the next steps to fix? Any one else getting similar problems?

After being a very happy customer since GOG went live and extremely pleased with their service, I'm frankly amazed they allowed this (and Riven, which I am also having issues with) to be released at all; with such obvious flaws in, it's a real pity that GOG is allowing these releases to tarnish its fine name in this way. Rather they had not released at all and stuck to games which -do- work with modern OS'es - that's the whole point isn't it?

Well... the game's page does not list Win 7 as a compatible OS, so that might be your problem there. Not all of GOG's games are Win 7 compatible as of now.

Try to play it in a different machine with a different OS or in a Virtual Machine loaded with XP or Vista.

I know for a fact that the game works flawlessly on Vista, I own it and have played through it already.

Ah...

My own fault for not checking Win 7 compatibility I suppose. Of course, I didn't HAVE to buy the Cyan Worlds deal either but I've never played Riven or Uru and I had hoped they made the older games compatible, making the whole bundle very cheap and an attractive purchase.

Thanks for confirming for me.

I have faced the problem of buying a game that won't run on my PC in the past and paying expensively for it. It's awful, but don't give up, as I said, try to find alternatives to run the game or google it up a little bit, maybe you'll find an answer.

I know for a fact that realMyst wouldn't originally run in anything modern, so GOG already did a lot making it run in Vista. So don't loose hope. :)

Try these steps.

-Apply these settings to the game shortcut:
XP compatibility (SP2 or Sp3), disable visual themes and Run as Admin.

Once that's done go to the game start menu folder, right click the 'setup' icon and choose the option 'Run as Admin'. When the setup tool pops up change your 3D Hardware settings fromDirect3d T&L HAL to Direct3d HAL .

I'm running the game without any issues on Win7 64 bit.

This worked for me! Thanks!
And to be more specific, I went with SP2. When I was trying to get it to work, I was using SP3, but I didn't know to disable visual theme as well at the time. When I switched to SP2, I also disabled visual theme. And that's when everything finally started working - the stuttering stopped and the video's played. Since it was working, I didn't bother to retry SP3.
Anyway, thanks a lot! I thought I was going to be troubleshooting this all night =D

You're welcome, i'm glad it worked for you ;)