If you re-rent the room in the Ducal inn (don't recall how long you get access) your items should be put back. There is a way to permanently loose items (at least in the disk version), by storing things in the chest in the house in Verdistis before completing the quest that makes it available to buy.
I'm pretty sure you should have gotten a key when you bought Malcolm's house.
The game does get easier as it progresses, but you can stop distributing stat or skill points, or remove pieces of equipment, etc, to keep a bit of a challenge, if increasing the difficulty is not enough. Some skills are over-powered, though a couple were modified in the download version to reduce that.
differences between classes (minor spoilers)
The
Divine Divinity Music Extractor (72KB) by BrainBox will extract all of the music in the game, at least for the disk version (the download version changed the path, though it wouldn't be terribly hard to move the sound file to the expected path temporarily; see
DD music). You will need an audio player with ogg format support, such as
Zinf or Winamp.
Alternately, the composer
Kirill Pokrovsky has the DD soundtrack (and more) on his website in mp3 format. If you check out the D2:ED music (which is similar to the DD/BD music), be warned that the game description at the bottom of the page is quite detailed, and goes into key plot points near and at the end of the game.
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