Question the second:
On an unrelated note, one day my gardener showed up for work and got out of the truck, at which point the truck disappeared and a new gardener showed up. Repeat as desired. All these gardeners decided they would rather watch TV or eat snacks than garden, so I guess they were behaving as normal visitors. I finally managed to use something (don't remember what) to delete the npcs on the lot so they would go away. The next time I had the gardener come over, a whole pile of them (maybe six or seven) got out of the truck and proceeded to make themselves at home. I haven't kept playing to see if it will happen again.
Is this something that anyone is familiar with? Perhaps a faulty hack? I think I have 'daily gardener' or some such from here, maybe some others. I'm still just using OFB, and have not gotten any hacks that were not (theoretically) OFB-compatible. In fact, I haven't gotten many new ones at all in a long time, because I stopped playing for a while and now I'm seeing if I'm interested enough in the game to shell out for pets and seasons.
Okay, I've just re-installed my entire game with all EPs and Stuff packs about a week ago and I've just had this problem in three different houses.
When I get rid of all of the gardeners (by dismissing or ending services), the next day the gardener that I originally hired turns up as normal and the problem doesn't tend to happen again (so far).
Unfortunately, as I don't tend to play with "testingcheats" turned on I've never managed to get an error log. All my hacks come from here or jfades site.
I've had a few sims autonomously juggle the damn coffee cups, but I thought that this problem was fixed with the OFB patch.