This probably doesn't help, but...

I broke down and bought Life Stories to be able to play on my laptop, and I noticed those thought bubbles, too. It doesn't happen all the time. I think I noticed it when there were guests on the lot. I remember thinking at the time, so Life Stories sims also hate bathroom users.

I think I might know what the deal is. My husband has XP Pro on his laptop, and we fixed it so that he has access to his files on his desktop computer even when offline from our home network. When he is back on the network, it automatically syncs the files. Look up "offline files" in the help. Anyway, an odd feature of this is that switching users doesn't work on his computer. I can't remember how I found out that using the offline files feature caused this....

Yes, which is why I won't be changing from XP anytime soon.... But some year I'll have upgraded my hardware enough to do it.

Here is an article I read this morning regarding games and Vista:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2090646,00.asp

  Yes, it's me--a long, long time ago....

I'm not sure what yours is for, but on the two recent laptops I've bought, there is a small, hidden partition where system  restore utilities are kept. On my new Toshiba, there is an option to delete the hidden partition if you don't  need it anymore (after burning a set of recovery CDs--they don't provide them, they just give you a utility that creates them) Perhaps that was what was on your smaller partition?

Yes, that's what I've done with my PC. Buying two cards at the same time is a waste of money. My little ol' 6600 is fine running Sims 2, but it will be fun to see the difference when I drop another one in with it.

My point about X16 doesn't really mean anything right now either, since today's games don't generally stress cards running at X8. But in the future, I'm sure it will make a difference to have both enabled at 16X in SLI. And it just sounds bad when you hear that they can't both run at 16X.

That used to be true, but now the newest nVidia nForce 4 SLI X16 chipsets support dual 16X SLI, instead of each at 8X. The A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard is an example that uses this chipset.

Wow. I didn't know how much I had come to enjoy coming here and checking the hacks for updates. Lurking. Laughing. Checked every few hours to see if it was back....

Wheee! 

Use a motherboard that supports SLI, and add in another graphics card in the future!

nVidia has updated their chipset to support 16 in both channels of PCI-E, and the motherboards that incorporate this are available now. The requirements for matching cards has relaxed some as well, and I understand they only have to have the same GPU now, instead of exactly the same brand and BIOS, as it was when SLI first came out.

I have one of the older plain SLI motherboards (Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe), have a 6600 card in it, and will add in another one soon. With 2G of memory, and an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU, even the single 6600 runs the Sims 2 smoothly.

As to the difference between a 6800 and a 7800, I have heard it is a large leap, and that there is really a large performance advantage. But there is also a huge price difference as well, and I tend to buy second or third best to save money.

The ATI crossfire option is also available to take advantage of two ATI cards, but I don't now as much about it, and the technology isn't as mature as nVidia's SLI.

Maybe Amazon is fulfilling orders in roughly the order they were received. Mine still says the ship date is estimated to be the 6th, and I just pre-ordered it two days ago on the 28th, right before midnight. Took a long time to make up my mind whether I wanted to pre-order to get the extra mascot costume....

The stats say it is #1 seller in New York and #4 in Arizona.

It used to be possible to remove these invalid Remove Program entries using TweakUI, but I noticed in the XP version, it doesn't seem to be possible anymore.

Doing a search, I came across a couple of possibilities if you don't want to edit the registry directly. From someone's post in a forum, they said that you can download a trial version of System Mechanic 5 from www.iolo.com. I've seen this tool mentioned in MaximumPC magazine as well, but haven't had any personal experience with it.

Also, there is a freeware tool that is downloadable here: http://www.soft32.com/download_9082.html

Hope that helps. Losing a hard drive to hardware failure is a real bummer. Had it happen to me a number of years ago. Spent a bundle of money sending it to a recovery company, and they didn't find anything of value. Just a month ago we lost our laptop drive. Fortunately, the laptop was backed up regularly, but I still managed to lose our contacts list from Outlook. 

And yet, I still don't regularly back up my main hard drive. Keep meaning to get around to implementing an automatic system....