True, but I can't remember whether anti-redundancy was available for Uni when it first came out, and I think that was when the spawning of bartenders began.  I seem to remember there being a specific bartender hack at first.  (However, at my age, I will admit that my memory does sometimes play tricks on me.)

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aprilfools1.html

Thought this might interest you, Alexx.

But it didn't eradicate the ones that were already spawned.  And if the game has been going for some time, it seemed to me it was probably being played before the patch that fixed it was available.

Think it must have hated the Ramaswamis...but everything's fine now, time to build on a nursery!

Since Big Brother is the one with so much stuff on the HD, it does sound to me that you may be right, Morriganrant, and it certainly points to the suggestion that he is not the computer whiz he thinks he is!

After running Ad-aware, I'd also suggest something like the trial version of jv16 Power Tools to clean up the registry and compact it.

Invisigoth, I know the OP said it happened with a brand new hood, but I thought it might help to know why it happened in the first place.  And I wasn't sure whether he meant a new hood or a new sub-hood, which would surely be two different things.  If it was a completely new hood, then obviously it had nothing to do with the first hood being corrupted, but if it was a new sub-hood, then there could have been a problem with the main hood.  And yes, I did read the OP, I'm not stupid, I was just trying to get a little more information.  If the problem is in the Uni program files and the OP is, as he says, running all EPs, then by isolating the cause it might be possible to replace the corrupt files and save having to do a complete uninstall/reinstall.

I totally agree with you there, but let's face it, if EAxis made the game to suit everyone, there'd have to be a million or so different versions!

The main thing I wish is that some of the features of the game, such as zombies, vampires etc., could be made optional when you first start your game up after installing the EP that contains them, but I suppose that would have been too cumbersome - so maybe with Sims 3 they might just have a supernatural expansion with all that stuff in which you could then choose to buy or not to buy!

Also worth checking to see how many bartenders and drivers and some other NPCs you have, there should really only be three of each sort, and if you have dozens of any of them, you must have been playing without Pescado's antredundancy hack which stops this from happening.  Put antiredundancy in if you haven't already, then search out the Deleted2 Electric Boogaloo thread for a tutorial on how to use the debugger to get rid of the surplus.  There are already far more NPCs in the game than are actually needed, and a couple of hundred bar-tenders is just ludicrous, the game left to itself will generate a new one each time you visit a comm lot with a bar.  At around 350 kb for each one, that's a lot of bloat.

Thanks, Ellatrue, that's a relief!  Just hope they get Priya's nose and not Sanjay's.  Why do so many male Maxis sims have a nose that wouldn't look out of place on a toucan?

Basically, if you move My Documents onto your second HD, then everything in it will move, including the My Pictures and My Music folders.  So if your brother keeps stuff in those, it will move with My Docs and be just as accessible as it was before.

I think I'd get your mum to create different User Accounts for each of you (and unless your brother PAID towards the computer, I don't think age should come into this at all!  I'd say it sounds more like rampant sexism on your brother's part!)  and then set herself up as the administrator.  Then, there is a way of only allowing a certain amount of space to each account (I'm not sure how it works as I don't have your problem, but I know it's an option on my Vaio laptop - it may not be a Microsoft option, maybe it's some other program that allows you to set the limits, but I'm sure someone here would know).  You can then password-protect your account so your brother can't get in (he can do this too) and yet your mother as administrator would still be able to check what is being downloaded by each of you, and unless your brother is meticulous about cleaning up his internet activity, she would be able to check up on that too - not so much prying as simply if someone doesn't clean up all the stuff that gets in, you soon have bloat everywhere!  One example is that a lot of downloaded programs come with an installer.  You install the program, and either delete the installer or save it to your second drive, but the installer has also installed a copy of itself within the program files, so there are two identical installers on your system where you only need one - and it makes sense to keep these on your second drive, or to write them to a disc, so that if you have to do a complete System Restore you don't have to go all over the place to find the stuff you've lost.

And I think you should make the point that any program runs better from the main drive than from the second, some won't run at all if they aren't installed in the Program Files.

If you still have the file, you could check for it's origin with the Clean Installer (I usually stick a single file I want to check onto the desktop and check it, it's the quickest way I've found) and hopefully you would find something to help you work out how you got it - possibly on a downloaded sim?

I think you're right, they must be old memories - JM used to have a noreunionspam hack, but it was discontinued way back, so obviously it was no longer needed, but of course, if you didn't have it in your game when it was needed, you would have got the spam.  I think in your case it would be worth going through every set of memories in SimPE to see what else has been left behind from the early days!  I appreciate it would be a mammoth undertaking if you did it all at once, but provided you keep getting rid of gossip on a regular basis it should only be a case of, ok, I've played family a, b and c, so now I'll just check that everything in their memories is ok.

Also worth checking manually in sim relations for relationships with unmet sims, and in particular relationships with simself.  These can be deleted in Sim Relations, but you need to save for them to truly be gone, and then you need to check the Relations panel in Sim Description for those relationships and make sure you set them to unrelated by rightclicking on them and checking the unrelated option.  Then commit, and when you've done that for each one, (I use the option at the top of the list so that all the relationships show in one fell swoop) click that option to reload, and those relationships should no longer be visible in the related list.  Once you have saved that, those relationships should only return if your sim is in contact with them again (usually happens when they are walking by on another lot), although relationships with self sometimes seem to return when they have a birthday.  Don't bother, though, about NPCs, those relationships will keep returning, so there's no point in getting rid of them. 

Also, check for any relationships with unknowns, these should also be cleared out. 

In a hood with only about 100 playables, I've managed to get rid of up to 1,000 useless relationships this way, and in a hood the size of yours it just adds to the bloat.  (Only clear out those relationships which are clearly shown as unknown to each other and make sure you get both - if one of them is shown as known, then you're probably best leaving it in, as sometimes that sim will phone your sim and it can be a way of adding to your sim's list of friends.  Quite often it happens when they are chatting online, you find they have an "unknown" relationship with other sims that were online at the time, but they won't be in their phone-book, so to my mind at least they are totally useless.

Since it's broken, maybe someone can fix it?  You could try asking around.....

The new site is TJ's own, permanent new home, so he shouldn't be moving again. 

I agree, I hate it when members of the modding or design community leave us, gaps are created that never really get filled in quite the same way, but that's life, I guess.

As I said, that first install of Uni is often screwed up - but the same has actually happened to me with every EP I installed for the first time from CD or DVD (not with the EA downloaded version though) so I tend to think that absolutely brand-shiny-new discs sometimes don't install properly, but once they are just slightly less so they reinstall fine.

Not even time to put the kettle on or rush to the loo!

If you use cleaned-up templates for your building hood, and therefore get no character files to load, then installing the hood files themselves shouldn't slow loading much.  Also, having no CC in your build hood makes it load pretty quickly. 

Whose computer is it, yours or his?  If it's yours, give him a separate account, and then limit the size of that account to 25% of the space.  And I can't see that he is such a computer whiz if he thinks that tiny percentage of space is enough!  If he has loads of music files and videos then the main HD is NOT the place to store it - tell him to go buy himself an external HD and save that stuff on there.

Personally, I hate it when I have less than 40% free space on my main drive, everything runs at snail's pace.  Even on my laptop I never go below that limit, and if I do, I clean stuff out straight away.

Oh, and if the My Documents folder is moved to the D drive, then all the music and stuff should get moved too.

One other thought, if it is YOUR computer, and your brother is downloading questionable material, you can be held legally responsible if it is discovered by the authorities (at least, here in the UK you can) so I'd check and see what exactly he is so bothered about - but then I've been around a long time and I've learned to be suspicious.

Well, I've frequently uninstalled my latest EP and then reinstalled it, and never encountered a problem like that!  But I would never uninstall, for example, NL, if my latest EP was Seasons, I'd uninstall backwards to NL, and then reinstall everything afterwards.  And usually unless the registry key itself is faulty there's no need to uninstall/reinstall.  If it's a faulty file within the install, then that can be copied over from the CD/DVD or the download back-up in Program Data without resorting to that extreme.

However, if you are just playing the Base Game + Uni, there is often a problem with the first install, I know I had one, and so did a lot of other people, and uninstalling Uni and then reinstalling it after rebooting and defragging worked for me.  Just save your game folders in My Documents onto the desktop and put them back in afterwards. 

The only other thing that occurs to me is that, if you are only running Uni, you may not have installed the CEP, and you need this for recolours of the stuff like the cheap shower to show up .

I think that's part of the trash that gets cleaned up, anyway I don't have that hack in any more, and I'm only running up to Seasons.  Saying that, I haven't used the clean up trash option in this game, do it manually in SimPE as there are one or two memories I want to keep for the moment, and I haven't seen the family reunion one in a long time.  Mind you, my sims at present aren't throwing many parties....I tend to use the groups option for family members and I have a feeling this doesn't throw up that memory.

However, since JM's hack is, you say, only in the NL folder and nothing later, it may be one of the few things Maxis cleaned up.......

Have you tried running Clean Installer through that Character Files folder?

Also, maybe if you delete the NeighborhoodManager.package file and then load up your game, the missing characters will generate so that SimPE can read them.

His stuff is still up at the first other building....

I'm sure Sara_Dippity must know where it is, since she has tried to make it writable - you can hardly do that to a folder you can't find!

Anything's possible.  There is a way of replacing broken portals over at MTS2, at least it used to be there, so it might be possible to save your lot if it is a portal that's damaged in some way.

Yes, I'm pretty sure there's only one registry entry for each EP = Base game and if you use a registry editing program they should display the full name of that EP etc.  One thing I will say about EAxis, they don't clog your registry with half-a-dozen different entries for each one.

I think I will try your suggestion of saving and exiting at the same time and see if it makes a difference - I tend to think it's due to the graphics card memory being overloaded, though, as when I've checked just minutes before, I can still have about half my available RAM still available! 

Have you tried reinstalling to your C Drive, and just keeping My Documents on the D Drive?  I don't know how big your C Drive is initially, but maybe there's stuff there that you don't use that can be cleared out.  Also, provided your PC isn't throwing any non-sim-related problems, it might pay to use diskclean to get rid of most of your restore points if you haven't done so already, as they can use an enormous chunk of a small hard disk.  Also, you can save a little more space by checking for useless other language files in programs that you use that may not have given you the option of whether or not you needed them (Sims included! - and in every single EP too.  I've removed them in the past and never had a problem from doing so, just so long as you leave in the files for the language you are using.  You can also move part at least of your paging file to the D drive.  Making it non-dynamic also helps, as you don't get lag every time Windows decides to increase/decrease the size of it.  Paladin has a tutorial which includes how to do this, plus some services that can be disabled etc., over at www.simwardrobe.com which I found very easy to understand.