More Awesome Than You!

I'm sure this has been covered somewhere, but for the life of me, my search skills, in this forum, suck. 

I have played sims, and dealt with issues with the sims, from the original version.  I'm relatively familiar with ways around bugs, but this just keeps happening to me.

I play my game, happily, for several hours.  I leave the house I'm currently playing, go back to the main neighborhood screen, close the game as recommended, come back either later in the day, or the next day, and the game won't start.

I get the opening splash screen, then nothing.

Normally, changing the name of the Sims2 file in my downloads, restarting from scratch, moving all my cc back in, and restarting seems to do the trick, but it's happening more and more often.  Am I doing something wrong?  Is there a faster way to get around this?

I run nearly exclusively MATY hacks.  The only one not a MATY hack, is the bigger families hack and the anti-waistband hack.  All my downloads are organized, and I delete things I don't use from the cc catalog in either CAS screen, or in batches directly from the files in my downloads folder.

Help?

Does it happen if you reboot your computer?  I know you said the problem returns "the next day," but some people never shut off their rigs.

It seems rather random.  Sometimes it happens after I restart, but mostly it just happens whenever the heck it feels like it.  There seems to be no pattern to it, hence my problem.

What about deleting groups.cache before restarting? Have you tried that?

I believe it might help to remove the non-awesome anti-waistband hack.  Also run the HCDU from Paladin to make sure you don't have any hack conflicts (there are some of JM and TJ's hacks that show conflicts and you can ignore these, as they are geared to load in a particular order and thus won't conflict).  Next, check you don't have any hacks that have been either rendered unnecessary/obsolete by patching, or have been updated since you last checked.  Particularly, make sure you don't have any hacks left around from the base game or Uni that haven't been updated.

Personally, I would do what Brynne suggested, and delete groups.cache before starting your game. Every time I've had problems with my game not starting, it's been solved by deleting groups.cache.

I (almost) always delete it as a matter of course, but on the odd occasions I forget, I have no more problems that usual, but it probably hasn't had time to get corrupted.  Basically the problem with any such file is that it has to be writeable, and any writeable file can be corrupted and then of course the problems start.

I bow down before the awesome.  You are fabulous!  Thanks for the help! :-*