Sim with 6-7 lifetime aspiration benefits now only has 1 wtf?

Anyone have any idea how this happened? I haven't been back into game yet to see if I can fix it by resetting the aspiration points using the Renu..Orb. I'll update on whether that worked, but the How/Why of it is more important to me.

Charles is a werewolf and witch. He has 6-7 aspiration benefits. I'd been playing the family for hours and discovered the benefits and points had vanished in game. I saw he had a point to allocate, opened the panel and found that all the existing points had vanished! I also noticed his father was no longer family & he has a problem getting anywhere - lots of route fail where other sims have no problems. Magivestum works fine thank goodness. The rest of the family is OK as far as I can see. I saved, quit and looked in SimPE. The family tree and relationships are OK for both dad and son, but all Charles' memory tokens for motive modifiers have vanished bar one.

Charles lives with other sims and dogs in a forest, so it's a messy, laggy lot. It was winter too. Dogs are having puppies and Charles is studying witchcraft. The HM has been and approved the family thanks to Charles cleaning up the dead leaves by witchcraft. I have a fairly full set of awesome hacks in the game exc wfsanity. I've edited memories for this family and it is basically a potentially buggy lot in a big 'hood (big for my PC anyway), but still.... wtf?

[UPDATE - the Orb worked - he got his 6 points back, but I still want to know what happened so I can avoid a recurrence. He is clearly buggy because he refuses to climb even the smallest slope and has to magivestum pretty much everywhere and leave the slopes to his brother. How do I fix that?]
[edited to make more sense]