baalorlord

Hi,

My BWP install (customized tactics) has been suffering from minor slowdowns recently. Every few moments the game pauses briefly, affecting everything on-screen including my cursor. This stuttering effect is identical to that described by others in threads such as http://www.shsforums...rs-gate-bwp-8/. The stutter is not severe, but it is slowly driving me insane.

I am in chapter 2 of BG2, having played through all of BG1 already. I have gone through the full recommendation list at http://www.shsforums...47 and discovered that the only thing that puts a complete halt to the stuttering is to kill Haer'Dalis. However, the stuttering is removed if he is ever resurrected or kicked from the party (alive or dead). Kicking him and then killing him does not help either. I have tried every method of removing him that I could think of (petrification, imprisonment, etc) but the stuttering only halts if he is both dead and in the party. The other solutions help to varying degrees but do not stop the stuttering; it is still slightly noticable if I kick all NPCs, drop all items and bags, turn of scripts, and put my charname in a small area with no other creatures. The only thing I have yet to do is try LStest, which I have so far avoided because I have no experience with such matters.

So it's clear to me that something Haer'Dalis is doing is causing my troubles, but I'm not sure what it could be. Does anyone know what might be causing this? I know others have had similar troubles with NPCs that caused stuttering except when dead and in the party - has anyone found a solution to this (even if it means losing the NPC forever)?

Aside from that, I have a few options left before me:
-I have a save from before I recruited Haer'Dalis, which I could load and play and avoid recruiting him. This means losing almost 10 hours of gameplay however, so I am very reluctant. The save is so far back that I may want to just restart BG2, even.
-Play through as far as I can with the stutter in the hopes that something I do fixes it. I fear burning out on the game if I have to force myself to play it though.
-Play with 5 characters and a dead Haer'Dalis.
None of these options are very appealing to me, so I am really hoping I can find some way to fix this.

A summary of the things I have tried:
-Dropping all items in Haer'Dalis' inventory.
-Dropping all items in everyone's inventory.
-Removing each character one at a time and resting.
-Killing each character one at a time and resting.
-Setting everyone's scripts to none and turning off AI.
-Dropping all my bags of any sort.
-Mucking around with saves; loading an earlier save and then loading the affected save without returning to main menu. Also importing an affected save to ToB and then loading the affected save again. Neither helped.

At this point I am tired and out of ideas so I turn to you gents for help. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.