Lot loading problems: Crashes and hangs

[hedgekat]

I recently had to have a reformat and am reinstalling slowly, playing in a test neighborhood after installing each pack. 

I have just installed Seasons and tested with no problems.  Then I put back a saved neighborhood from the old install.   It's a large hood with over fifty households spread through the main hood and two subhoods. 

In the 27 houses of the main hood I have had three lots crash during loading, with Access Violation given in the log.   The first of these I had entered twice before it crashed though did not play nor save.  Just trying to determine what custom content was missing.  The other two houses crashed on first attempt to enter.

I have read all the threads that I could find here on Access Violation and have attempted all the fixes given that I understood.  The tech language in some was over my head.  Specifically I deleted the cache files and removed the Downloads folder.  Still crashed.  I did have testingcheats enabled but received no error popup nor log other than the Sims Exception log.     Any further suggestions as to how to get into those houses without having to remove the families would be greatly appreciated.  In most of the incidents there was 200-300 Mb of RAM available out of a total of 1024.

A second problem that I was able to fix involved lots hanging during loading, requiring ctrl-alt-del to exit game.  That happened with two lots.  Turning on testingcheats in neighborhood view before entering lot generated a popup listing emitter-pet-car as the culprit.  Neither lot owned a pet or a car nor had a stray present on the lot.  However both had a carpool vehicle and a schoolbus sitting in front of the house with drivers standing beside them.  In both instances I had to hit reset and cancel and delete,  not in the same order. 

[jolrei]

Is Seasons your latest EP from your old install?  I'm just thinking that if you had BV, FT, or AL installed and your backed up 'hood was from that game, reinstalling the hood on a Seasons game will not work.

[hedgekat]

I did have up to Freetime installed but I used Numenor's anygame starter to play different hoods with different eps.  The hood I am trying to play was never played past Seasons.  Would that still cause problems?

[jolrei]

Not sure - can you create a new custom hood and play it?  Can you play any of the default hoods (i.e. Pleasantview), or does the game hang on those as well?

[hedgekat]

Yes, I had been playing a new hood, complete with downtown, shopping district and Uni and multiple, with at least one family in each subhood.   No problems at all.  Or at least no more than I have ever had.   No lot crashes anyway. 

I haven't played any of the Maxis hoods because I have one or more played versions of each already and didn't want another.  However I did enter a couple of them.  Loaded properly and had no trouble entering a random lot in each. 

Another anomaly I'd noticed with the old hood was on neighborhood screen would often get flashing white patches when moving. One section or another of the screen, from near center to edge, in a more or less triangular shape, would suddenly turn white, then back to normal as I rotated the view.

I had a lot of custom content in this hood that disappeared in the reformat because I had forgotten to back up the Downloads folder.  Could that have anything to do with it?  I know content from eps I don't have installed can cause crashes and otherwise incompatible or corrupt but didn't think it would if missing.