Hi folks, I'm on my first trip through IWD2 (having played through every other Infinity game umpteen times) and am experiencing some annoying pauses. Every so often the game will freeze momentarily, before resuming. I read through the sticky threads above and neither seems to address this issue. I've had no problems with the other Infinity games.
I have a three year old Athlon 2.8 running XP and a GeForce 6200 graphics card (which is new...the old one burned out earlier this month). Other than that, fairly standard set-up.
Cheers.

Btw, where does this happen? If it is in the second level of Goblin Warrens in Horde Fortress it is known bug. There's fix on this very site.

Pretty much from the start of the game. I'm only at the logger town in chapter 1 just now.

Do you have the official patch installed?

Yes. I'm not getting it as much in Chapter 1 but the Prologue was pretty bad.

Well no further reoccurences (the goblin warrens were a bit sluggish but I gather that's a normal problem with it). One of the things I did was to turn off translucent spell effects. Spells are really ugly now but I'm not getting any more pauses.

i noticed the same problems with translucent spells...but only when there were lots of them on the screen (like the druids casting 3 entangles on top of me).

Well as it turned out, it wasn't the spells (though they can cause lag...the Guardian battle was terrible!). I experienced the pauses again a couple of times, but it must be something else because restarting the client fixes it. Not sure why it's happening but at least there's a solution. Worth noting if anyone else gets the same problem. To think I suffered most of the Prologue with this problem!

Are you using EAX in the Sound Options?

have you tried a program called CPU IDLE (i think thats the name...). It helps keep your CPU resources from being all pulled ( i think). It seemed to help with some things...run the game in a window with your Task Manager open and watch the CPU usage...if it spikes to 100%, try CPU IDLE (free trial).

Its meant to keep your CPU cooler in case it crashes due to overheating but that seems to create this side effect.

I have an app that measures my CPU fan and temperature so I don't think overheating is the problem as it never gets into dangerous territory. I'll take a look at the program though.