I bought this game hoping against hope it would work without a problem in Vista. Unfortunately, it just doesn't. The game downloaded and installed fine but whenever I play, random crashes just shut the game down. I tolerated this at first but it has just become too irritating.

I know Vista does not work well with many games and on top of that I have an ATI Raedon Sapphire card, which I have since learned can cause problems with this game. I'm not really a tech person, or at least knowledgeable enough to figure out what exactly is the problem. Considering the fact many play this game and seem to love it, the problem , no doubt, is unique to my setup. I play many other games without a problem and just don't know what the issue is. I just don't want to buy another card just to play this game either ,though I really found it interesting.

Anyway, just my experience. Take it or leave it as you please.

Recommendations:
-Redownload and reinstall if you got your installer files before Jan 3 (or download and apply the 1.69 critical rebuild patch) to get files that may be missing from the install
-Disable shiny water in your video options
-Change your audio settings to use the Miles fast 2D positional sound (this or completely disabling sound fixed the random crashing on my WinXP machine)

There are probably also some other helpful hints lying around this forum.

But all this would require more effort than just complaining.

Ain't that the truth.

Yeah using Vista 64 here and the game was crashing till I disabled Shiny Water, now hasn't crashed in 30+ hours of play.

Vista 64, Sapphire Radeon 4870, (AMD Phenom II, if it matters, which it shouldnt).
NWN works fine (although some custom modules still cause occasional crashes) if "shiny water" is disabled. Shame, that water looked pretty nice, but the effect only works on some geforce cards (old drivers required even then?).

Fiddle a bit with graphics settings, try the usual "run as administrator", reinstall if necessary.

The game definitely works with Vista+Radeon combo.

lol why bother trying to help any more, 90% of the people posting questions here don't come back. Not to mention the fact that 90% of the questions asked are answered three threads down.

Hey, but it was worth posting because I just downloaded the game on a Vista machine and now know to disable shiny water ... so thanks from a different user, anyway.

Here's an idea, maybe people are "just complaining" because the game is broken, a game they payed for and states to work on Vista & Win7.

I'd take your advice but the game won't even launch into the game, i can get to the initial launcher but there is no way to turn off "shiny water" from here as far as I can tell and since I bought the game last week I assume it has the correct critical patch applied to it.

While responding to this I tried to launch as an administrator, it runs but if i try to skip the intro splash screens/animation it crashes, if I let it run through those I finally can mess w/ the settings...shiny water is not turned on. Not sure how I feel about having to launch as admin everytime I want to run this game in addition to having to watch every splash screen.

Try running the game in windowed mode, see if it helps.
If you don't want to run the game as admin, install it outside default location.
To disable intro movies, edit nwn.ini file and under [Display Options] add line:
Disable Intro Movies=1

wow, some people really just don't know how to type 3 simple words into the search, just about every problem possible with this game has been asked about 20-30 times, sometimes more than once in the thread it was answered in. You CAN NOT blame gog because of a problem you and 3 other people have, if everyone had the same problem that would be different, but it still would not be gog's fault. YOUR PROBLEM IS NOT THE SAME AS THE ORIGINAL POSTER. He had no trouble with the intro's as you did. Not to mention the adminstrator thing has to do with windows 7 locking the Program Files directory which is for your security.

You people are lucky that these forums are so nice and helpful, if this were ANYWHERE else, 99% of these questions would not be answered 3 times a day like they are now.

I did do searches of the forums I also read through the front several pages of posts. No my problem wasn't the original problem I was simply stating that I felt the OP frustrations because of the issues I was having with the game as well, and what seems like many people if there are 20-30 posts for one problem that's a sign there is a bigger issue.

And yes it IS GoG problem if something they sold me won't launch right after installation on a platform they state they support. Actually, if anything, GoG is lucky to have this forum as I prob wouldn't have gotten a solution to my problem and I prob wouldn't have bought anything more from them, but because of the feedback I got on an off comment in the forum I'll prob end up picking up a few more games knowing that in addition to GoG's hard work, there are talented and dedicated fellow gamers here to help out when one has trouble.

Actually if there are 20-30 posts on the same problem, its due to people not bothering to search or read when they could instead waste other peoples time.

Here is a topic that could have helped you on the front page: link

and after a quick(very quick) search here is another:
link - this was the fifth one down, and the title is the EXACT same description as your problem.

I highly doubt that you could have missed these.

That aside, I've never had this problem(and I run 64-bit win7), and many others on these forums have not as well, I don't know the exact numbers of NWN sold to win7 users, but 20 is likely not a large enough percentage to warrant looking into, as it is likely due to a conflict with one or two specific games or drivers that only you few people have installed, this is more a problem with computers in general, if you want to avoid it it is YOUR job to know what you do and do not have installed, not gog's.

All that said, I'm glad you found a solution in the end, and I hope you enjoy the game.

Disabling shiny water in the options fixed my crashes. None since then. Try it if you haven't already.

I had the same problem with my Vista rig, but the game runs fine. The problem is the launcher. Just create a shortcut to "nwmain.exe" and run it from there. There's a trick for opening the DM client. Manually modify your shortcut to map to "nwmain.exe -dmc" and the DM client will open instead of the standard game client.