Somehow I've screwed up my game.  I used Numenor's shop at home clothing rack, and after buying one particular outfit the sim started jumping every time I clicked on a dresser or coat rack.  I didn't save, and tracked down the offensive outfit and deleted it.  That seemed to solve the problem.  However I recently moved him in with his fiancé in preparation for their marriage, and now the bug is back for both of them.  Clicking on the dresser makes the selected sim jump, and choosing an action causes another jump, so that they never do whatever you told them to (like change clothes).  I tried removing every dresser and coat rack on the lot, deleting the sims in debug mode, saving, and then deleting the hacked coat hook from the Downloads folder.  The bug didn't die. 

Unfortunately the lot and sims have lots of custom content.  I can't remove the whole downloads folder and try to figure out which download, if any, is at fault.  I haven't been able to recreate the error with a stock sim.  I've attached the error log from one of the jumping sims, but it makes no sense to me.  Can anybody tell me what to do to fix the problem, or are these sims ruined?  Please help. 

A possibly related bug involves clothing stores.  When I take a sim to a community lot with clothes racks, the game goes into buy mode as soon as the sim gets out of his car, with the live mode button greyed out.  The sims disappear, and it is as if I had entered the lot from the neighborhood view.  I have successfully taken sims to restaurants and a pet store since this bug appeared.

I have all the EP's through AL, and FFS, M&G, and K&B.

Strangely, I'm using the no-cd crack, and have no trouble going online to download stuff.  I have searched and found no trace of securom on my system.

Do spaceship visits during early stages mean that other players are visiting my planet, or does the AI do it too?

I turned off shading, even thought there has been no blue-screen or crashing, and this time I was able to play for over an hour without it freezing, though the fish tank was boring.  Of course, it has been totally random, happening once after only five minutes and another time after twenty.  I could have just gotten lucky.

One neat thing is that, other than the freezing, the game does seem to be responding faster.  Before it has taken several seconds to enter buy or build mode, and at least half a minute to load collections, but now they come right up without a delay.

I didn't mess with free will since it will happen in buy and build modes too, when the sims aren't doing anything anyway. 

Yes, I updated the driver too, which installed this bloated Nvidia setting control thing. 

So you think this has something to do with the video card?  I am getting so sick of EA.  I almost didn't bother with Bon Voyage, after the SafeDisk fiasco, but since I have no problems with NWN2, I figured I'd risk this SecuRom.  After all this there's no way I'm messing with a Sims 3.  I was really looking forward to Spore, but now I don't know if I will ever buy another EA title again.

Alright, I just installed Bon Voyage.  Unfortunately, it randomly freezes after a few minutes of play.  The sound continues playing, but everything is locked up.  The curser will still move for a few minutes, then it will freeze.  There seems to be no pattern.  This will happen during play, buy, and build modes.  I cannot minimize the program or bring up the task manager.  The computer will not shut down after pressing the power button or restart with ctrl+alt+delete.  I have to cut the power manually by holding the power button in.  I reduced the sound acceleration in DirectX, as EA recommends, and then turned it off entirely.  I set the affinity to CPU1.  I have turned off all back ground processes.  Of course I tried it with no CC.  Nothing solves it.

My system more than  meets the requirements, but to be sure:
XP Media SP2
PentiumD 3.2 GHz
1 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256MB

So far I have only found references to this problem on macs.  Has anyone heard of this problem on P.C.'s, and a way to fix it?

So you can restore the original exe, run the patch, then switch back to the cracked?

So just to be clear, I can't use the patch with the cracked exe?

The cracked exe worked.  Thank you so much. 

So basically they implemented some new copy protection device that is broken on some machines, even with the safedisk update?  And I suppose that with the DMCA it is illegal for me to use the cracked exe, even if it's the only way I can use the software I legally purchased.  I really, really hate these corporations.

I'm afraid I have no idea what a mini image is, and I've never heard of gamecopyworld.

After looking up gamecopyworld, I will try that next.  In case that fails, what is a mini image and how would I use it? 

Thank you for your help.  You're the first one to offer any new suggestions outside of EA's tech "support" FAQ.

I have the same problem, except that the game does show up in Task Manager for a few minutes while the light on the CD/DVD drive flashes.  When I removed the entire Documents/.../Sims2 folder, the game failed to recreate the various subfolders and files, except for the logs folder.  There it generated twenty files, all of them 0 kb and empty of information.  This has happened after a half dozen reinstalls, including one fresh install of the whole thing (base game and all EP's).  My computer more than meets the minimum specs.  I've updated everything that can be updated, and even downloaded that stupid Safedisk thing Maxis recommends.  At this point the game cannot be played.  As I said in my tech support request to maxis, if this can't be resolved, it looks like I'm done playing Sims.