Sims 2 not responding after buying clothes

[Candyfloss]

Hi there, I hope someone can give me some help with this problem which I've encountered on several computers over the years.

Basically I set my neighbourhood up with several sub-hoods to minimise loading times and that works great even when I have 50+ families. My problems come with aging up and saving:

When a sim ages up they get new clothes and when my neighbourhoods are new and relatively empty I can save with no problems, a regular, quick saving time. As time goes on though and my neighbourhood gets bigger this saving time increases and I inevitably give up and start again. With 50+ families the saving time was 20 minutes even if only one new outfit was added to the wardrobe. I ctrl alt del and task manager says EP9 is not responding. I've experimented with taking out all my custom content and it makes no difference, it definitely seems to be linked to the number of families.

As I experienced this on my old computer and my current one I assumed it was a common Sims 2 problem and that it was just because of my huge number of families. I posted my problem on another board I use and people there said they had huge amounts of familes and no problems saving, it's not a techy board though so no one could help me.

Does anyone have any ideas why this may be happening and how it could be fixed? It's making the game unplayable.

Thanks in advance

Here are my specs:

[Tarlia]

You say nothing of how many houses/buildings you've got - a big number of these greatly impacts the total file size of the neighbourhood, much moreso than the number of sims, and therefore loading/saving times as well. Unless you have a crazy amount, though, 20 minutes is still way too much. How many sims do you have - are these 50+ families normal sized? Do you use much CC? (Normal CC shouldn't affect saving time, but various dubious hacks might do funny things.) Do your sims live on big lots with huge houses and lots of objects?

Pretty much a shot in the dark. I play a merge of all the EAxis neighbourhoods, which has 80-100 families, 650+ sims, and a whole lot of subhoods and buildings, and the saving time is never more than a minute or two, even on the biggest and most populated lots. My specs aren't too different from yours.

[Candyfloss]

I have 1.04 gb of custom content which is all clothes and hair. My families range from 3 to the occsional 10 per lot, on average 4-5 sims per family. Most of my sims live in small houses, I don't have many rich sims and the ones I do have live in a subhood all their own. The game runs perfectly apart from this one problem: I can zip around between hoods and downtowns in a couple of minutes, it takes less than five minutes to load the game from the start but this bloody clothes saving bug is ridiculous. I dread my sims aging up because they get the new outfit and boom: 20 minutes not responding. I turn my antivirus off, delete my caches, I've tried it with no cc at all. It's doing my head in but it's happened now on two separate computers, what the heck is going on?

[Tarlia]

I've got no idea. Sorry. Just curious, why do you think it's related to (the amount of?) clothing?

[Candyfloss]

It saves fine every other time, it only lags when someone has aged up or bought new clothes or jewellary.