Partial time-warp? How'd I bork this?

[Jackathyn]

I was playing a family that had recently had its' third and fourth child, and extended the house a bit. Once the eldest had aged to teenager, I sent her to the shopping district to buy some new clothes.

However-
Once the lot loaded up, the one who'd gone to the store seemed to have been the father. No problem, I thought, I must have just clicked the wrong one, and I bought the clothing I wanted her to have anyway. Took the father home, and that was where upfuckery made itself apparent.

The third and fourth children were gone, and the formerly teenage daughter was now walking around bow-legged, apparently being registered as a child. Her little brother was crawling around creepily as a toddler does, despite being a child. The game seems to consider them to be the age stages they are behaving as. Everything seems to be time-reset to my last save in the family's memories. It's like the father while the father was at the store, time went in reverse or some shit.

It wasn't a full time-warp, either, despite the memories of everyone concerned- the house was still extended, and the cribs the poor doomed babies had been in before leaving were still sitting there, only empty. I checked with SimPE, and there doesn't appear to be any data on the two youngest little boys whatsoever.

My questions are thus: WTF? Also, BFBVFS?

[J. M. Pescado]

This is a side effect of partial file locking, often caused by SimPE being open or other such problems. Unfortunately, if this is happening, it also means...

[Jackathyn]

I didn't have anything open at the time, just the program itself... any idea what might have caused it to do that?

... Guess I'm making yet another new neighbourhood. Hooray.

[GayJohnScarritt]

  Check your anti-virus/spyware programs.  If they're running actively in the background, they may be interfering by corrupting character data.

   In my case, SpywareDoctor was causing corruption of character data, which was the cause of my disappearing infants during Save (your game automatically saves the home lot when you go to a community lot) and borked age transitions.

   And Pescado is correct in that the spyware/anti-virus is causing a partial file-locking.

[Jackathyn]

I just installed a new version of antivirus yesterday, now that you mention it. That makes a lot of sense.

Thankyou! I wish I'd known that would happen before.