I also have been irritated by the stupidity of my sims - if they can reach to put the homework on the desk in the first place, then why the heck are they suddenly not able to take it back off the desk? I got fed up with the idiots and now everyone gets a nice table lamp or something on the left hand side of the desks to stop the annoyance.

(I have all expansion packs and stuff packs, except M&G - too scared to install it.)

cwykes - way back when I installed the Seasons patch, I had exactly the same problem with one of my neighbourhoods - the neighbourhood view screen would never load, the screen would just keep flashing all the time, but with careful
mouse use you could find and enter the lots, which all played normally, and if you could get into them, the sub-neighbourhoods loaded and played fine too. I found sometimes that if you entered a lot, moved one of the garden trees and then saved and exited back to the neighbourhood, then the neighbourhood view was back to normal, but often it wasn't. Even if it was, if you exited the game and then reloaded, the flashing was back. At the time I had an ATI Radeon 9200 128 MB AGP graphics card which functioned perfectly well, apart from being unable to see fishes in ponds and fish tanks, the enhanced pool reflections or the x-ray snow cursor.

I searched around the various forums that I belonged to at the time but I've only ever encountered one other person who experienced this problem, and he was as mystified as I was. It was most frustrating - all the other neighbourhoods were absolutely fine. Eventually the flashing became too much to bear and the affected neighbourhood was deleted. I've never experienced the problem again and never came close to finding out what caused it.

I always pre-order each expansion pack as soon as it is possible to do so, but then I don't install it until most of the glitches and bugs have been found by other, more impatient, simmers and an official patch has been issued.  I also wait for a while before installing official patches, just in case there's a problem - something which stood me in good stead as far as Seasons is concerned; no problem installing H&M for me!

So, my advice: wait, wait, and wait again, until any bugs have been discovered and patched, and most mods/hacks have been updated.