[SixOfSpades]

Edwin's quest is both iffy and buggy. Allow me to clarify: In the original version, the conversation immediately after obtaining the Scroll was life-or-death for the quest: If you said the "it's party treasure" line, the quest whould eventually continue, but if you said the other response, the quest would end right there. (Or maybe it was the other way around. I'm not sure.) However, this was a very poor decision on BioWare's part, because both conversation responses are equally valid, and so a player could unknowingly screw himself out of a fun quest by making a sound roleplaying decision. But cheer up, there is a mod that changes this (I think it's the "Edwin" component of Weimer's Ease-of-Use mod), by making both conversation responses allow the quest to proceed.

The quest is still buggy, though, in that it time-dependent. Quests that are based on the game's timer (Edwin's and Jaheira's quests are the big offenders here) tend to be buggier than than ones that only check whether "X event has occurred," such as Nalia's quest. So the game might choke up at any part of Edwin's quest, and you could be stuck with an irritated Edwin for the rest of the game. So what you might try is to make an archived Savegame right before you obtain the Scroll. If Edwin's quest fails at any point, you can reload the archive game and try again. The downside to this is that Edwin's quest takes about 3 weeks to complete, so that's a HUGE amount of time lost.

But even if Edwin's quest crashes and burns, that does not by any sense of the imagination mean that Edwin himself is useless. Heck, people use NPCs like Aerie, Viconia, Minsc, and Imoen all the time, and they don't have quests at all.