More Awesome Than You!

I was playing the Harvard family last night, just loaded the sims and when I enter Pleasantview I get the neighbourhood story book pop-up, as if it were my first time of playing it.
I go to where the Harvard's live and their house (the actual builing, pool and landscaping) has DISAPEARED!!! There's a green plumbob over the land where they are (the family is still there) and I can enter the lot, but the house has vanished!
All my settings have changed (texture detail, reflection, etc). It was/is a corner property and the side of the road the mailbox/bin (and therefore taxi/car stop) used to be on has changed to the other side.

Anyone have any ideas as to what the hell has gone on?


P.s. Does anyone else think it's one problem after another with this game?

I don't know what has happened, or how to help you, but I find the 'corner' lots pretty screwy...I tend to never use them.
If your family is still there, I would move them out into a new lot ;) Then see if you can bulldoze the lot.

p.s yes I do ;D

And I've just entered another lot and I can't access any of my downloads (I have lots of downloads). I click enable to the pop up just before entering Pleasantview, and when I enter Pleasantview and click on settings is says that Custom content is on, yet most the stuff in the houses (obviously not the one that's missing) is flashing blue, and all my custom content is missing from the buy/build catalogue.
Anyone have any suggestions, because this is something I have never encountered before and I have no idea how to fix it.

you have to shut down the game and restart it in order for the custom content setting to stick.

I did restart it, and it made no difference, it still won't allow custom content. Any ideas??

Does anyone have any info on how and why the house disappeared, but the family remained on the plot of land?

That happened to me once. The house disappeared, but the plot of land and the family living in it still remained. A pity, because I was quite fond of their house, too. It wasn't a corner lot, though.

I have no idea what caused it, but it hasn't happened again. Yet.

I went to a different lot (where the father of the Harvard family lives), his daughter (who lives at the vanishing house with her mom and brother) has disappeared from his family tree and all of his memories of her are as $subject!!!???? And no picture of her next to the memory. Any one have any ideas?

My idea is that your game has become a Big Fiery Ball Visible From Space (BFBVFS). In other words, it has become horribly corrupted for no apparent reason. Did you do anything stupid, like open SimPE & edit sims while Sims 2 was running in another window?

Did you already try deleting groups.cache? That sometimes fixes thumbnail oddities, which could be the cause of your initial problem. I'm not actually convinced it'll help, though.

Do you have backups from before this happened?

I make regular back-ups of my neighbourhood folder, but since I started playing the sims (i.e. Sept 2004) I have had to replace the 'current' with the back-up at least 10 times! And in the early days I only used to make a back-up about once a month, so there was a lot of repetition, so as to get the back-up to the same stage as I was at when it went crazy.
I've never done anything with SimPe, I'm too chicken!
The last time I had a similar problem (with a teen disappearing and only being remembered as $Subject) I deleted groups.cauche and it made no difference, so I just put it back again.
I know that there's much talk on this forum about the dangers of having too many character files, I have 1338 in Pleasantview. Could this be a factor?

Oh. Probably... Do you have JMP & TJ's various Too Many Iterations Critical Fixes? They're supposed to hold off BFBVFS syndrome for a while, but not indefinitely if the number of characters keeps going up...

Do you have NL & the NL patch?
 

I have NL and I downloaded the patch for those who have NL. I don't have  JMP & TJ's various Too Many Iterations Critical Fixes, I tend to only download 'fun' stuff! I'll go have a look over in the download section.

P.s., thanks for helping me.

You said your settings were changed; did you check to make sure that the "Catalogs display custom content" is selected as well as enabling them?