I saved my game last night just after receiving the quest to go around to the guardposts and ask the watchmen about their shifts. I booted up the game today and now the guardsmen won't give me the proper dialogue. All they will give me is directions to other places and then gripe about the crime in the area. Leldon's thug Brennon was resurrected behind the City Watch building and attacked me again. Inside the building the guy with the Cormyr Brandy spawned next to Marshall Cormick and the 2 thugs inside the cage are out and wandering around freely. Further to the west side of town, the Luskan pirates are standing around one of the guardposts waiting for me to approach, but when I do, the bribery/fight does not click in.

I was afraid to go nosing around any more after all this, as I thought perhaps lord Ao himself might fart in my general direction. Anywho, is there a fix for this? If not, i'm screwed as I only have this one save file. Is there a way to advance the plot using the console window to get around the quest? I'm not good with that crap, so I figure if that's the way to go I'd ask here for help :).

There are console commands to force most events in the game, for example the proper dialogue sequences in your quest. I'm afraid I don't know them personally, but some googling and perhaps asking around on nwn2 boards will probably turn something up .

rs 10a_faulk_state(6)

Might get the sweeping the docks quest started again, but I doubt it would get you very far, your save game has lost too many of the things you've done & starting again is probably you best option.
Hard save often, use a new name & don't overwrite the old saves, & don't use quick save.

Quicksave works just like the other saves in my experience. If you're having trouble with your globals, I doubt avoiding quicksave will make a difference, and for everyone else there's just no reason not to use them.

However, making incremental saves with new names after major events is useful for other reasons, like going back to do things differently, or picking up something important you dropped, and is good practice in general.

I think I was convinced by prior posts that I've read on this problem that it is caused by some but not all of the files necessary for a proper state save being updated.

Something you might try is to find all of these file locations and to modify the admin rights to the folders they are in so that everyone has 'full control'.

If for the people who are having this problem & if it is a Win7 64bit permissions issue. (I don't know if it is)
Then editing an existing save (like quicksave) is more likely to run into problems than creating a new save.

Alcaray's suggestion might be worth looking into, but I am further into my current game than I have ever been & the upgrading of the keep in Act III is working properly for the first time.
I don't want to jinx myself, because I have thought I have had it sorted a couple of previous times only to come to a gamebreaking end.

Making a quicksave isn't editing an existing save -- it's deleting the existing save and replacing it with a completely new one. If it didn't work that way, then you wouldn't be able to use the quicksave slot in completely different campaigns or modules, as you can.

Ok, then if you are having this problem, I would not use quicksave solely on the grounds that you will have further to go back & redo if it didn't save properly than if you had differently saved hard saves.

If your not having this problem, then obviously it doesn't matter.