totally random, but I have had to do hard reboots three times in the past 24 hrs, when this game totally locks up. Has anyone else has this happen, and if so...how did you address it?

maybe something is wrong with your pc

no. this is the only game that does it. No other software, productive or entertainment, does it. No websites, nothing but this one game. Between Malware Bytes, my AV and my security protocols...my PC is in pretty good shape.

I don't know then

I don't know if this helps or not but there are patches available. You can get them here:

https://neverwintervault.org/patches

Good luck.

I'll give it a go...THANKS!

I wouldn't do that.
None of those patches are newer than 1.231765, which is the GOG version.
What sort of FPS are you getting?
If they are ridiculously high, you should enable v-sync.

Not to contradict you but if he tries the patches and they don't work, he can always reinstall. That may also solve the issue.
Also, Gog recommends running the game in administrator mode. Are you doing that?

I was in Admin Mode, yes.

Gonna give it a break for awhile. The frustration level was growing too high. Turning to an old, all time fave game...Morrowind.

The first time I ran the patches, I had all three games installed. I tried the patch for NWN original, SOU and HOTU but I got an error the patch was not the one for my installation. I had to remove all three, install NWN then run the nwn original patch, install SOU and run the NWN SOU patch, then install HOTU and the NWN, SOU and HOTU patch.