When attempting to open Neverwinter Nights, by double-clicking the NWN icon, nothing happens - no error messages and no conflict messages. However, upon shutting down Windows a message appears with a progress bar displaying ‘NWN is shutting down’ as if it has been running in the background. The computer is a Pentium 4 2.6GHz with 256 MB RAM and a 128 MB ATI Radeon video card.

There have been problems reported regarding NWN locking-up during game play when using an ATI video card. The recommended solution to this problem is to update your video driver, as ATI fixed the problem with the issue of an updated driver. Although this is as you probably already know, a very generic solution, it does actually work in quite a few cases! You can download the drivers for your video card at www.ati.com/support/driver.html. If you are unsure of the specific details of your video card, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘dxdiag’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the DirectX Diagnostic Tool which appears, click the ‘Display’ tab. Details of your video card will be displayed within. It may also be worthwhile updating the sound drivers. You can find details of your audio device by clicking the ‘Sound’ tab in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.

If you continue to have problems, try closing all non-essential background applications before opening NWN. To do this, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to start the Task Manager. Another suggestion is to reduce the screen resolution before starting the game. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Display’ control panel. In the window that appears, click the ‘Settings’ tab. Reduce the ‘Screen resolution’ slider to the lowest setting. If your screen goes black and does not return, this means your video card or monitor does not support a resolution that low. Don’t worry - if you wait 15 seconds Windows will restore your original resolution.

Finally, if there are any patches available for your version of NWN it would be worthwhile updating. You can find the latest patches at nwn.bioware.com/support/patch.html.