More Awesome Than You!

After spending hours today reinstalling and the game working fine aside from my CC refusing to show up due to a corrupted resources.cfg, I'm suddenly getting this error and I'm at a loss for what could be causing it and how to fix it so I'm looking for ideas and suggestions I might not have tried.

Googling the error message itself wasn't much of a help; there's only 2 results for it on MTS2 and while one fixed it, they closed their thread without posting how they fixed it except to say "cleared user data" and the mods have now locked it down. The other result stated that it was a problem with the registry and the path for the game - I checked my registry and every EP and SP points to the right targets and the sims3.reg suggestion made no difference.

No one here on MATY seems to have posted about this problem before, anyone that has gotten the "Unable to start game: Service Initialization Failed" error has a different registry string at the end of it and is related to patching, which doesn't apply here because the game is fully patched.

I removed all my CC, including the framework and the fresh resources.cfg I had just installed, with no luck. I know a common fix for the game is to delete caches, I deleted all of them without any luck and the final thing I tried just now was a total wipe of my EA folder in My Documents. My game rebuilt the shell folders, but instead of rebuilding them all as it has previously, my The Sims 3 folder now looks like this:


Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to try and fix this issue before I just do a total wipe and spend another bajillion hours reinstalling? I have all EPs and SPs installed and I'm on Vista SP1, 64-bit with 8gb of RAM and a 2.6ghz quad core, so I don't think it's a hardware issue.

Did you try using CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/)? If it really is a registry thing, that might clean it up. If it doesn't help and you do wind up uninstalling, it might be a good idea to run it before you reinstall, too.

I'm not confident in CCleaner, the last time I used it it wiped out not only long-dead registry values but it also wiped out half the registry values for my anti-virus and my PC got royally borked because my anti-virus started to make my PC bluescreen on startup when the info was noticed as missing.

Whoa, glad I always create a backup first, then. I've never had any problem before with it, but there's a first time for everything. You could try going through your registry manually and looking for duplicate entries. Maybe use the search function?

I just got the same error, but it occurred for me after stupidly letting the launcher apply the latest patch. I tried patching manually only to find an error in the World Adventures patch (for region 1, at least). Might it be a hidden patching problem?

...

Did you read the part of the OP where I said I was patched up to date? It's not a patching issue and I don't use the launcher. My WA is region 2.

I had this exact problem just a couple of weeks ago. CCleaner is no longer my friend. It didn't fix the problems I had (several old games that had been uninstalled ages ago yet still showed in Add/Remove Programs), and gave me a lovely BSoD that locked me out of my PC for more than a day and resulted in my missing a limited-time-offer interview for a job.*
*I now have a full-time temp job and may be getting a dream position starting next Monday elsewhere, so I forgive it the lost interview. I do not forgive it the lost time and frustration while I worried about how I was going to afford a new PC if things were irreparably borked whilst living on government cheese.

Strange!

I have been using CCleaner for a long time (running it, usually every couple of weeks or so) - with no problems. In fact I downloaded an update today and ran it. I later reloaded the system, also with no problems.

Maybe it is a conflict with CCleaner and a particular Aniti-Virus program. What AVs are you using. Also, are they up to date.

Mine, (PCguard)  is specific to a cable company in the UK. It updates automatically every few hours - if necessary.

Avast/Comodo combo, with MalwareBytes used only for periodic full scans I do once a month during system cleaning.

I use 2010 norton...so not exactly a mom and pop indie AV. Can we stick to the thread issue though instead of derailing into CCleaner beefs?

My only suggestion would be to bite the bullet and do a fresh install, and use the patcher from MTS to download a new patch before installing the next EP/SP.  Doing that will get you a full patch to hang on to so next time if you need to install you won't have to work through a lot of patches.

Yeah, I might try doing it that way this time around - last time I installed all of them at once and THEN patched them all using the MTS patcher. It's the first time I've had this problem with the game ever, and it's also the first time I've patched them all at once so I'll go back to my old way of doing it and see if that helps. Given no one has posted a reasonable way of fixing this that works, I'll be sure to post an update if it does fix it.