I spotted this issue, and found a workaround, but was wondering if anyone else had found this:

When running NWN, I found that if I Alt-Tabbed to the desktop, then the taskbar would be missing, along with my desktop icons. Widgets weren't affected.

they were still missing after quitting NWN.

To workaround this, I did CTRL-Alt-Del into Task Manager.

I clicked on the Processes tab, and found explorer.exe in the list, right clicked it and ended the process.

Clicked on File, New Task, and typed explorer.exe in to start it again.

Bingo, taskbar and icons came back.

Dunno if this is a problem with Win 7 or not rather than NWN, and I'm not entirely sure if this is the best workaround for it, but I hope someone finds it useful!

Oh, and in passing I'd like to add that I'm very grateful to GoG for this DRM-free version, thus allowing me to play this game on my laptop without having to have a $#!++!ng internet connection. I already have boxed versions of NWN and expansions (two of each: one for me, one for g/f so we can LAN), but for a few quid the sheer convenience of having the whole kaboodle ready to install on a USB key cannot be beaten :)

Why would you need to ALT+TAB out of NWN? Just use X-Fire if you need to check private messages and similar.

In worst case I guess you could run NWN in windowed mode. There is a guide how to this on the NWN forums somewhere I think.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/subindex/153

Oh, it wasn't anything hugely important, but it wasn't anything X-Fire could have helped me with: I just had the pdf manual on in the background, that's all :)

I think though it was more likely to be an issue with Win 7 (or Windows in general) than NWN.

Anyway, I figured that fi anyone else was Alt-Tabbing for whatever reason (e.g. working through a walkthrough or something) whilst playing NWN they may find this workaround handy.

if you enable windows mode could then use Alt-Enter to toggle in and out of Full screen.