More Awesome Than You!

Basically, when I scroll over certain large parts of my neighborhood, I can only see the shadows of trees and the floors of my houses and the game moves very slowly. It's not my custom content; I've loaded it with custom content disabled, enabled, and enabled without hacks. I don't think it's any of the neighborhood decorations, because I placed every single one of them in one of the parts of the neighborhood that acts normally and they didn't screw anything up. I've tried deleting a bunch of trees and absolutely nothing changed. I just installed the pets patch today, then I loaded the game and everything was normal. After that, I installed Seasons and the Seasons patch. I guess I should have loaded after installing Seasons, but whatever. When I loaded the game, it looked like this.

Pictures:

This is the weird view.
(http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y132/monkeysyodel/alex2.jpg)

After I move a tiny amount to the right, everything is normal again.
(http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y132/monkeysyodel/alex1.jpg)

It's not that lot at the bottom left, either. Everything actually seems to be functioning normally; I can enter lots and the furniture appears normally and everything. I haven't actually entered a lot with characters yet. I'm a little afraid of what I will find.  :-\

So, has anyone else ever had this problem? Can anyone help? Please?

I believe this is purely a graphical artifact.  What be thine video card?

It's a Radeon 9200. I checked the drivers, and I think the most recent version came out in November 2006. I'm pretty sure I have that version...I could be wrong, though, and I don't know how to check it.

I've had a slightly similar problem after installing new EPs -- for some reason, EA thinks my video card (Visiontek ATI 1300 XT) is a low-end card, and when a new EP is installed, it sets all the graphics settings to their lowest settings.  Setting them back to what the card can really handle usually fixes it.

So check your graphics settings in the game.