More Awesome Than You!

I want to start over, reinstalling the game clean.  However, I do not want to lose all of the houses I spent hours building.  Do I have to move everyone out of their homes and pack the houses in order to save them without the occupants?  Please help.  Thanks.

you can just package them up while occupied, then reinstall them with clean installer, being careful to only select the lot fragment and NOT the families.

You can also download Inge's Stay things shrub and place that on each lot, move out the families and then package each lot.

Thanks for the tips.  I should have said I don't care about the contents either, just the building structure.  That said, I'm wondering if I can save the lots in a separate file (without having to go into my game and pack files) and then move them back with Sims2Pack.  Since I really don't NEED to do a reinstall I could just move out my neighborhood files and let Sims regenerate the neighborhoods.  I'm just sick of my families.  I tried decimating and it didn't help.  Besides, I'm close to 800 and am already having some issues.  Might as well begin again.  I have played the same families since the game was released and they have gotten boring.

I think maybe you could just backup the lot catalog folder and then regen the neighbourhoods.  I would test this first though, because I'm not totally sure.

Hey, the way I am feeling about the game these days, I guess it would just make it more interesting if the whole thing blew up!  Thanks Blue, I will try it (after I back up).

Well, you could try putting your neighborhood through a version of the Scorched Earth challenge.

Doing that with clean installer can have some weird effects, however... the house will be empty, but the game will think that it is occupied... and it might be renamed something crazy like "prefer a dunk in the pool to a wet blanket, you'll find everything you need at Pleasantview supermarket"

or at any rate, it has happened to me

I think if you go the lot catalog route, you'd need to move the houses to the bin first.  If you back up the lot catalog file and replace it after the hoods regenerate you'll still have the houses in the bin.  That definitely works, I've done it myself a few times.