Ok, I am having a few technical problems w/ IWD2. The first is that after a certain amount of time....the screen will start to flash and then the whole game starts to flash. when i try to save, it crashes and says some sort of assertion error for some file(very anoying).
That was the only problem until recently. I just started chapter one and when I get to this one certain part, my mouse locks up horribly and makes the game unplayable. I'm wondering if there is a patch out or something to fix this or if anyone else has had similar problems. i have windows xp.

[ September 27, 2002, 09:43: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

are you using any kind of cordless laser mouse? I had to stop using my cordless laser mouse on my desktop computer because it would randomly quit working and I had to pull 'n plug back in the USB port...basically reinitialize it on the IRQs and it was really annoying, because once you lose the mouse in the game, it won't recover you have to restart the game. etc. etc. the flashing issue...sounds like a driver problem to me, or a hardware acceleration problem, you are most certainly underpowered, what graphics card are you using ? try lowering the bit quality of the graphics to 16 bit, although this doesn't make any difference on my machine, it might improve your performance,

whenever you post a technical problem, it's common practice to tell your system specs too, the nitty gritty of what we'll eventually need to know to help you anyways, so graphics card, ram, chip speed, game graphics AND audio settings, display settings are an ultra important one..etc. etc. you can find all these in your device manager, just right click on the "My computer" icon on your desktop then tell it to "manage" then click on "device manager" in the tool tree of the window that opens up, etc. etc.

another thing to try, make your default screen size on your desktop, a close equivalent to the game screen size, which is almost always 800X600 because driving anything more with a computer game would be begging for system failures...1240X800 or whatever it is, is a close approximation to 800X600 as well, and should be ok....

next...your assertion error...bad bad bad...um...no clue abotu that, sounds like you should also reinstall the game and tell it to do a FULL install and make sure it doesn't throw it on some hard drive other than your OS drive...if you have extra drives that is...you can feel free to email me if you'd like at arcaedus@yahoo.com but this is about the extent of my knowledge for now...most errors like the one you are describing are...registry problems *begin ominous music* or some nice subtle disagreement between the coding of the game and your particular computer manufacturer, i.e. gateway, dell, ibm, asus, etc. etc. etc. for instance...I have a gateway and it seems ok to Gateway I suppose, to install Roxio Audio software that disables and/or corrupts my driver interactions with the onboard ethernet that comes with my particular motherboard...do they care? no....and neither did your manufacturer when they made your system either...so it's possible that you may not ever be able to play Icewind without an issue...I myself had a major performance issue in one of the maps...but I sluggishly went through the level as efficiently as I could...*sigh* lol anyways, I've been writing furiously on this forum now...I think I'll stop while I'm ahead... ::arcaedus::

Here's a solution that helped me with a lot of game problems I had under windows XP
right click on the games icon and select properties. Click on the compatibility tab and select click on the first selection and a list with different operating systems will appear, try changing that to windows 98 or something like that
This helped me play a lot of games like Fallout 2 or Warhammer 40000, and some games like unreal tournament play a bit better after a change like that

The flashing problem generally occurs with the Catalyst drivers for ATI cards. Presumeably ATI is working on it, but in the meantime, there are some work-arounds - check here (http://feedback.blackisle.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57669).