Hey. So I decided to play a wizard and this stuff is going totally nuts. When I cast spells the whole thing chugs like mad, the screen goes black and a round takes 5 minutes. My system specs are well above "recommended," though i do run the thing on a bootcamp install of Windows 7. Anyone know how to fix this? It's pretty ridiculous.

Google for something called DDraw Fix and if you have multi-core CPU change affinity to all of them. I think they forced one core for compatibility reasons but I have only crashed twice since I changed that and it sure as hell helped with the performance part, especially when you get some graphical intense spells.

Even well above recommended settings, if you set the resolution too high you can struggle for frames when a lot of stuff is going on screen.

A common (potential) fix for your issue is to install the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit. Zeckul's guide to installing Icewind Dale 2 on Windows Vista & 7 has pictures stepping you through the process, which basically boils down to pointing the 32 bit compatibility fixer part of the toolkit to the exe for your game (planescape's in this instance), and enabling 'force direct draw emulation' to run when you play the game (start the exe).

Just follow Zeckul's pictures closely but substitute iwd2.exe for planescapes exe, wherever you have it installed.

the easy way ddraw fix

I forgot about the toolkit, it helped me from getting a crash everytime I quit the game but didn't seem to help performance or graphical issues at all (Win7 64-bit here) but I could be wrong.

I made a patch for this, the really is no need for toolkit to be honest. That crash on exit was really only thing it fixed as far as I know. Patch string is included if you want to manually apply it, otherwise will be in next update.

http://www.shsforums.net/topic/53607-crash-on-exit/page__view__findpost__p__534259