Halp! Spontaneous game data corruption! [apparently fixed]

[Heodez]

I've been lurking here for a long time and read tons of threads, but never heard of a problem similar to mine. It happened twice actually:
- about 2 weeks ago, my sims01.package in TS2/TSDATA/RES/Sims3D got corrupted, which caused very bad glitches and made the game unplayable. I figured quite quickly where the problem was (my sims01.package was 1kb big) and proceeded to reinstall the base game to get a clean file. So far so good, it worked fine.
- today, the game wouldn't even start, crashing at startup: 5 files are corrupted! 3 sims08.package (Base Game, Seasons and Freetime), the basegame objects09.package, as well as the base game UI.package in TSDATA/RES/UI.
The thing is: last night, the game was fine, and I didn't touch anything before trying to start again this afternoon! No new downloads, no simpe tweaking... I have absolutely no clue what causes these corruptions, and I don't wanna spend hours reinstalling stuff.
Any idea?

[Ruann]

This sounds very familiar for some reason.  I think this happened before in Sims2.  May have been Sims1.  If something in the game tries to write to those files and fails it could cause file corruption.  In theory, the only files the game should write to after install would be the ones in My Documents.   Try making the files Read Only after reinstall and see if you can run the game that way.  There shouldn't be any need for the game to alter those files.  Obviously, back up your neighborhoods before doing this as VBT could always happen when you muck with files in the install directories.

[Heodez]

So simple and yet so effective! Well, hopefully, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.  Thanks very much. So far the game seems to be working fine, & Bodyshop worked too.