More Awesome Than You!

I recently decided to reinstall the game after 'acquiring' HELS and Ambitions.  Got everything in, patched up, installed awesomemod and the 3booter/FPS limiter set.  Went to check out a few things in the game, and everything appears to work fine for my test sim.  I then went on a hunt for interesting custom content and installed a few other things.  The next time I booted the game and went to load my test game, I got this message:  "A serious error has occurred while loading "savegame.sims3". Restarting the program is strongly recommended."

I assumed it was due to the CC I'd just acquired, so I kicked it out of the folder (I'm using the My Documents folder method) and started over with a CC-less game in Pleasantville.  Still no dice - a very bland test game there fails to load as well.

Apart from removing all my custom stuff, I've tried using a cracked .exe, using awesomemod's CD check skip, and running the game as Admin. I'm running Win7 64-bit, on a 2.6 ghz Core2Quad, 6 GB of ram and a Radeon HD 5850.  I'm not seeing any kind of logs appearing in any directory in the way that they might in the event of an actual program crash.

Anyone have any idea what the hell causes this?  Unless something went wrong in the patching process somehow, I have no idea what could cause this; the game is recently installed, after all.  I'm contemplating reinstalling to see if that helps, but at this point I'm feeling more inclined to just uninstall the damned thing for good.

Try removing the entire sims 3 folder and restart and see what happens, the game will regenerate it for you.  You said it worked until you added CC, and presumable a custom town as Pleasantville isn't a base TS3 town, unless I have missed something, then it failed.  Sounds like something in your CC has corrupted some files permanently.

Failing this, you might want to try a complete reinstall.

I didn't even try loading the game before adding the CC to it, so it's possible that some file was corrupt beforehand and I didn't notice.  (Oh, and I meant Sunset Valley, I believe.  Whatever the basic neighborhood is called.  Not sure why I wrote Pleasantville.)  All gameplay features I can tell work just fine; the game simply seems incapable of writing a save it can actually open later on.

At this point, I'm leaning toward there being something wrong with my patches or crack.  The only explicitly hack-style CC I was using was Awesomemod, but it I gather is entirely possible that some kind of, I don't know, mangled clothing file could have damaged something somehow.

Bah.  Looks like I'm reinstalling if I want to play again...

That's always a good option when all else fails.  At least TS3 isn't too bad to reinstall at the moment as there aren't too many EPs and SPs to re-install.

Also, you could use the AM no-CD check option instead of a crack, one less thing to go wrong.

No, but there are fifty million patches. As of right now, I have 23 separate patches backed up on my D: drive.

I am not sure of your patching methods, but using a crack has caused lots of people more problems than using a no-CD check mod. Strongly suggest leaving the crack alone.

If you're patching after reinstalling, you can download one mega patch that will bring you reinstalled up to date.  You can go here (http://www.simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:TS3_Patching:Patch_Download#Downloading_for_Windows_Systems) for the direct links to the patches.

Last time I reinstalled I used this patch downloader http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=409829 from MTS, it gave me 2 patches, which I have saved to my harddrive, making future reinstalls much faster.