Installing NWN on Windows 7 can become difficult if there are compatibility problems.
If there are compatibility problems with the install the Program Compatibility Assistant (PCA) may flag the nwmain.exe file as unrunnable. I encountered this problem and wanted to post the fix I found in case someone else has the same problem.
The PCA would pop up whenever trying to run NWN and would indicate that there was a problem. If asking for details it only gave a long string of characters but didn't explain what it meant. It just stated that the string was wrong.
Apparently, when running an installer in Windows 7 the operating system looks for any compatibiltiy issues that have been noted (somewhere or other) for the program. It probably checks for lists of compatible software. If it finds a problem it alters the nwmain.exe file so that the OS will not attempt to run it.
If you disable the PCA after installing the problem is not fixed. The file has already been altered and cannot be run.
I believe that PCA looks for a "manifest" file that is part of the install and looks in that file for information about the program you are trying to install. One problem is that programs developed a few years ago did not have a manifest file or didn't have one that was compatible with other products developed since then.
There appear to be several ways to get past this. One is to generate a manifest file by hand. You can find out how to do this in the old NWN archives at Bioware.
A second way, and the one I used is described in these forums
http://social.biowar...7/index/3341490. To do this use the copy method. If you can find an installation that works on another computer, then you can copy the entier NWN directory onto your computer. When you do this, the OS doesn't modify the nwmain.exe file to be non-runnable. You should then put your new CD key in the CD Key file on the new computer if you are going to be using 2 NWN installations.
I copied the install from my other computer and when I tried to run the program the OS was willing to run it. The nwmain.exe was still not compatible so it gave me an error message. This time, however, it was a real error message indicating that an error had occured in a particular file and gave the name of the file. It was atiglxx.dll. You could get errors in any file that isn't compatible with NWN though.
At that point you need to determine where the file came from. Searching on the internet for the file name will probably tell you where it came from. In my case it was a file used by my Radeon ATI graphics setup.
The manufaturer of the file may have a fix for NWN or, more likely, a newer version of the file. In my case I just got the latest version of drivers for my Radeon ATI and installed them. This fixed the problem completely.
I did keep the old NWN directory on my computer also. This one has the modified nwmain.exe file. If I try to run that one, the OS still refuses to run it. So fixing the compatibility problems after the install won't fix the problem for a file that has already been installed and modified by the OS. It apparently has to be compatible at the time you install.
Modifié par Mudeye, 05 octobre 2010 - 07:43 .
