Just re-downloaded and installed everything fresh. I didn't put in any of the optional Ravenloft stuff, just the hak files and the tlk file. Seeing same problem. Game hovers around 95-97% CPU utilization and is grabbing memoy like crazy (45% after idling for about 5 mins).
I tried disabling the games SDL library and using the one from my system (by editing the nwn file and changing to "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./miles:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"). Same problem still happens.
Besides upgrading to Fedora 13 (from 12) I also switched computers. I had been on a system with an Nvidia 8800 GTS, but now I have an ATI Radeon HD 4850.
I might try running Windows XP as a guest operating system and see how that works out...