I'm having some serious tech problem. When I play NWN, the game screen except for the mouse will occasionally freeze, after which my entire screen goes black for a few seconds or up to thirty. Sometimes, it just stays black. Sometimes, NWN crashes entirely. Most of the time, the borders of my windows look odd and fuzzy like TV static. Most of the time, "graphic" things on my computer slow down-- for example, internet explorer opens normally and not slower than usual, but when I scroll down on the forums page for instance, I can see the line where the screen is raising or lowering, taking a full second to refresh the screen as it rises from the bottom to the top (or vice versa if I scroll up).

This is all especially bad when I'm in the character creation screen. During gameplay, it happens less frequently, and there doesn't seem to be a pattern as to when it happens (more or less often due to lag, large graphic effects, etc..)

My computer is only a year and a few months old. My only guess, and this is by no means an educated guess, is that my RAM is starting to go bad.

Any ideas?

Aha! Now THIS is interesting!

I wanted to see if this problem affected other games, so I popped in Rome: Total War. Never had any trouble with it before. As the game started, an friendly little error box popped up saying that the game was unable to find DirectX 9 which was required to play, although I know that I've got it installed (maybe even DX10)!

Apparently I need a new video card. Going to keep this up here in case someone else has suggestions.