More Awesome Than You!

We use Windows XP on our family computer.  My son and I both have TS2 on our perspective accounts.  I play my game and have my downloads on my account, and he has his stuff on his.  He is not a frequent player, but he plays about once a week.  Last night he tried to use Create-A-Family to, well, create a family.  The load screen works fine.  The next screen, the one that says, "Enter Family Name" was a lovely shade of sky blue, but the menu works fine.  If you enter a name and click, the sky blue screen stays the same, but the menu changes to the CAS menu. 

I tried using a clean neighborhood and creating a family, but still got the blue screen.  I removed his downloads folder, and it still did not work.  I switched over to my account and booted up the game:  CAS works fine. 

My son doesn't have any special backgrounds downloaded for CAS.  You can't even see the Sim.  It's just the blue sky and the menu, which appears to work normally. 

I think he has a file corrupted, but not sure if that's the cause or not.  I can't figure out why his, played sparingly, has screwed up, while mine, played almost nightly, works fine.  I'm the one with the big downloads folder and all the hacks! 

So, any ideas on what caused this problem?  How can I fix it without doing the obvious:  Doing a clean reinstall.  (Which would delete my innocent Sims!  :o )

The game runs off information (downloads, neighborhoods, et cetera) from the My Documents folder.  This folder is different for each user.

If your son is willing, you could copy your information into his My Documents folder--simply copy your EA Games folder inside My Documents into the Shared Documents folder, and have him copy it to his My Documents.

If you have to do a re-install (and I sincerely hope you don't have to) save your entire EA games folder and put it somewhere save befor uninstalling. I ususally also re-name that folder, just to be on the safe side, but that might be just my special brand of paranoia. Can't hurt though :D

You can then copy your EA games folder right over your newly installed one in your partition or user area. That will give you your game back as it was, since your account doesn't seem to be a part of the problem.

That's what I would do too.  (It's also worth saving the Neighbourhood file created by the install so if you get fed up with Pleasantview One, you can move it out and move in Pleasantview Two and start over!)

I can't imagine it would be a problem that would require re-installing the game again. If it works under your account, and has issues on his account, I suspect that maybe something might be wrong with his account settings and/or EA Games folder.

I also suggest backing up his entire EA Games folder. BUT, it may be sufficient to simply just save his Downloads, SavedSims, and Neighborhoods folder. You may also want to back up Collections, Music, and Movies, if he has any customized content there. And also, possibly the Teleport folder. I would say those are the most critical folders to save.

Then... since you are using Windows XP, I suggest creating a new User. I assume you installed sims under an account that had Administrator rights. If that is the case, you also most likely installed it so that All users can run the Sims. So... I think it might be best to create an entirely new account.

Then, back up your son's C:/Documents and Settings/Your Son's Account folders.
In this case, I would say the critical folders would be:
Cookies, Desktop, Favorites, My Documents, Start Menu

Maybe Local Settings. You might not really need Cookies, because those can always be recreated.

However, in the backup you just created for the My Documents folder. I would DELETE the EA Games folder, since you should have a backup somewhere else already of the folders you should save (that I mentioned above).

After backing this up. I would copy all of this over to the new account
C:/Documents and Settings/Your Son's NEW ACCOUNT

Go into this new account, start up the Sims 2. Have it create all the necessary folders and what not. Exit the game.

Now, go to your backup of sims stuff, and copy those folders over into the appropriate places in
C:/Documents and Settings/Your Son's NEW ACCOUNT/My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/

Theoretically, by creating a new account entirely, I would think that it is basically starting with a fresh, clean slate. Then, having the game create all the default stuff, the game should theoretically be clean. And finally, copying all the Sim data you backed up, your son wouldn't have to lose his game.

However, if you find that there is STILL a problem, after all of this, then I would highly suspect something may have been corrupted in your son's Sims 2 game data. :P In which case, its fuct and he'd probably have to start from scratch. :P

[Edit: I forgot to mention, after you go through all this. You can delete the old account, and rename the new account to the previous name of the old one. Confusing? I hope not. :P]

Ste

Thank you!!  That worked perfectly!!  :)  Al (my son) said for me to tell you that he is in your debt.  :)