On both XP and Vista, TS2 used to do this to me all the time. It would LOOK like it had shut down, and then I'd wonder why everything was lagging, check the Task Manager, and find that the process was still there. Then I'd kill it. After a while I learned to just automatically check Task Manager after closing the game, and kill the process if it was still there. I had to kill it just about every time after playing for a significant amount of time (an hour or more). Nothing bad ever came of it and I never lost any changes. Note: I have a habit of saving my lot and exiting to the neighborhood before closing the game, because I believe this could help prevent loss.

On Win7 it has never done this to me yet.

I suspect it's a processor issue, because that was my bottleneck on both my XP and Vista computers. I always had plenty of RAM.

I have six sims total that I know of, in a neighborhood of about 250 sims.

Here are two examples:

Burglar and Mandy the Hobbyist had a bad date and both got memories of it.
Townie and Mandy the Hobbyist had a bad date and only the townie has a memory of it.

They're not actually going on the dates, though. It's not like I had a community lot loaded and these NPCs were there on dates. They just have memories of having gone on dates. There's no way they actually went on a real date, since I would have seen them do it. I hadn't even taken my playable sim anywhere after the burglary, and yet the burglar clearly went on his date after burglarizing my sim (the memory of the date comes after losing a fight to the cop).

It's a pretty new neighborhood (Gen 1 of my playables), and nothing else seems to be wrong with it. I only noticed this issue while giving some townies makeovers.

Taking out hacks would be a good step, but I have no idea how long I would need to run the neighborhood to see if the problem does or doesn't happen. I've been playing for about three months and only a few of these autonomous dates have happened. Anyway, it seems like a hack that would cause this sort of behavior would have to be either modding dating, romance, or memories. I already checked for that, and don't have anything non-awesome.

Because the memories are so perfect (in the correct order, nothing else out of the ordinary about them), my first thought was that EAxis added this as a "feature" (like a replacement for Mystery Sims memories) in FT or AL and I just didn't notice until now.

My NPCs, including iconic hobbyists, townies, vacation locals, and even a burglar, have been sneaking behind my back and going on dates. The burglar, for example, managed to sneak out on a date with an iconic hobbyist the day after burglarizing my playable sim's house. The burglar's memories are Lost Fight (to cop), First Date with Mandy (the hobbyist), and Had Bad Date with Mandy. Mandy seems to be pretty popular, because she's been on dates with a few other NPCs.

I don't have any autonomous romance mods.

Are they supposed to be doing this? I'm having a vision of loading one of my playable families and finding their relationships trashed.

Do you have any mods that either hide or unlock EAxis stuff? I had some NPCs spawn without their special hair/hats when I used a mod to unlock those items. Similarly, a mod that hid some EAxis hair messed up my maids and firefighters once. A firefighter in a llama hat was kind of funny though.

Anyway, if a mod like that is to blame, taking it out now won't help, so you'll still need to fix their appearance somehow.

No, not really.

Anyway, I still haven't found any reason this is happening, but I did figure out that it's only happening in one neighborhood and only to a few sims (all playable). I figure the neighborhood is just corrupt, somehow. Good thing it was new and not very important.

Just to further document this glitch in case someone else gets it, here's a pic:

What would cause that? Nothing else seems to be wrong in this neighborhood, and it's pretty new with only about 100 sims total (playable and NPC). The other sim attributes, like skills, badges, and so on, are being saved correctly and I haven't seen them randomly change.

I guess I'll see if it happens in any other neighborhood.

My sims' interests are being constantly randomized. They're not being reset to their old status, they're actually being completely randomized each time. This happens constantly and I haven't found anything specific that causes it to happen. Every few minutes it will just... **poof**... randomize itself.

Yes, I already yanked all the hacks. It still did it even with no hacks. Originally I thought it might be the interestloss hack, but it isn't.

It just figures that as soon as I start playing the game again, it does its best to remind me why I had stopped playing it.  

If I find out this is a "feature" of one of the newer EPs, I will murder someone at EA.


ETA: I should note that this causes lag if the panel happens to be open. It's like that stupid re-rolling portrait glitch we had once upon a time.

Link updated by request.

Links updated by request (see first post).

You know, I missed the TS3 thing in the title, and I... still don't see how this isn't TS2. WTF? Why are you messing with my head?

Parrot: you already opened the files, silly. What you see in SimPE is all there is to see. Or at least all you can easily get at.

I suggest you open two instances of SimPE, one with the pre-Seasons version and one with the post-Seasons version, and look for any values that don't match. Extract the post-Seasons files and make a new package from them, and then try changing the non-matching values back to what they were pre-Seasons.

Even if you do find values that don't match, you'll probably have to do a lot of trial and error to try to get the effect you want. This is why you should never attempt to modify the original files.

If everything matches, it's the wrong file or we can't see/change the part of the file that would need to be changed.

What did you do to get this family "glitched up?"

Depending on why they became glitchy, it make not help to delete them at this point.

The key to keeping Windows running smoothly is to turn off anything it nags you to turn on.

I'm just a little sad that it doesn't want to be my honorary sock anymore. 

That, and also I'm hoping it's just being strung along until an anvil can be dropped on its head, because that would be amusing.

Oh. So either TardFairy is being baited, or it's been chosen as the replacement token tard that gets itself uncanned through good behavior, since we seem to have lost our other token uncanned tard.

The world makes some sense again.

This is a sad development.

It got untarded?

What 404? The tutorial is still where it was. Outdated or not, as far as I know it's the only one there is. How about PMing the creator?

Your video card is drunk.

Well, I think this tutorial is just too hard for someone to follow if they are using SimPE for the first time.

I also think that it would take longer to explain how to do it than to just do it for you. So if it's just one sim, tell me which template you want replaced (CPLA, ETGE, or whatever) and I'll replace it.

As a special public service, I can take screenshots of the process, so that hopefully the original tutorial will become more useful for people who are not experts in using SimPE. Or who are intimidated by the fact that there are so many complicated-looking steps. It's actually not that hard.

Did you already do the usual: delete groups.cache, delete all thumbnails, etc? Have you done any upgrades or updates to your computer? Something simple like an updated driver could be causing the problem. If you have automatic updates on, you might not even know what got updated.

I had a very similar problem on my laptop (but without demonic spinning), but it was due to low RAM. Maybe you should check to see that your RAM is still working properly. One stick may have died. Start by checking the easiest thing to check, which is how much RAM your computer shows itself as having right now. Also, check that your harddrive space has not fallen below (or even close to) 10% free. If you've done something like download a couple of movies, you may be running out of space and haven't realized it yet.

SimPE has a problem with consistency. And also spelling.

Manah-Angel-Eyes, now you have confused me. Tell me again what exactly you are trying to do? I thought you wanted to take a sim that you downloaded and turn it into a replacement face template. This doesn't (or shouldn't) need Sim Surgery or Neighborhood Browser at all.

Make a new file. Then look on the bottom of the screen. There are some tabs, and one of them is called Plugin. Click that. Next, look at the top-right side of the screen (the screen should currently be split into three panels). Right-click with the mouse anywhere inside the top-right panel. This will bring up a menu with those functions. Import = Add.

I'm still very partial to the idea of going haywire after the level of abuse reaches a certain point, and zapping everyone in sight. Aside from this, I really feel that my calling is to be installed as a permanent fixture on every community lot, recharging perpetually.