I have a feeling you all know this, but i found out you can import you bgate 1 items into the game, with all the same icons and no corruptions. Start a multiplayer game import the char from bgate 1 then go hacking away with baldurans sword or whatever, spiders bane etc, admittedly there are much more powerful items in the game, but you can get bored of them cant you? And anyway it feels like more of a continuation anyway!

Have you ever tried Infinity Explorer? BG1 stuffs are all there... meaning that BG2s database contains the past items. : )