Neverwinter Nights Diamond crashing on XP?

[Legacy_Demiel]

               Hey everyone, I've spent the past day or so being frustrated and I'm hoping you can help out.

I've got Neverwinter Nights: Diamond Edition from GOG.com and in spite of my best efforts, it just does not work. I've read through the first page or so of threads here and it seems like they're all about helping people on Vista or Windows 7, some of them even say "Works fine on XP!". But in my case, it doesn't.

No matter what I do, the game will crash on startup if I try to click Play from the launcher. I've also tried just running the "nwmain.exe" file, with no effect.

I'm running XP with Service Pack 3, DirectX 9.0 and I have an ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. I updated my drivers to the latest version I could find, from 6/28, and  I've also downloaded and installed the 1.69 Critical Rebuild patch from this site: http://www.neverwint...nfo/players.htm.

Anything you guys can do to help would be greatly appreciated, I played this game on a friend's system and really enjoyed it, so I'd love to have it for my own. '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_HipMaestro]

               I can only echo what has been responded in a few of the more recent posts.

In short, things to try:

Disable sound and/or shiny water via ini modifcation (0 means FALSE/DEACTIVATED, 1 means TRUE/ACTIVATED).
Check the compatibilities assigned to the exe files and be sure to run them as admin.
Revert to SP2.  You can always re-upgrade back to SP3 if you notice no improvement.
Try an OLDER driver rather than newer ones. (Some of the newer drivers do not support the version of OpenGL that NWN uses but, typically, the driver specs will specify what it supports and what has changed from the previous version.  How your card will run with an ancient driver is problematic but legacy drivers ARE available through the AMD site.)

If your rig is multicore and 64-bit, there are other issues possible but if you have at least got the game files installed on a newer rig, you are ahead of the curve compared to many others trying to install and run the game.  Unfortunately, it takes some experimentation to get these older games to run on the latest rigs and the effort required can be both prohibitive and discouraging for some.