Ran into this problem just now, when I try to turn off Auto Power Idle my Sims jump out of whatever they were doing. Switching to testing mode and trying again confirmed that there was a problem with the interaction, hence the attached log.
I know, why would I want to turn it off?
No real reason, I'm just curious why it isn't working in this particular instance.
I've also noticed that the offswitch doesn't work at college either, though I didn't get an error message in that case.