The sims standing besides empty chairs during meal service happens a lot in my game (all EPs). I also assumed it was hack related since there are a couple of hacks involving food service in the game. But if there's even a chance it's a new behavior that would be great. Sims being considerate and acknowleding other sims needs? Whoa! 

I built a few 1x1 residential lots just for the challenge of seeing if it could be done and than seeing if it could be done again, differently. I made modern 4 story homes. But, for me, the size limitations made them kind of dull to play and I bulldosed them soon after. Haven't tried them as commercial lots, hmmmm.

I was a little worried about using this on some of the painting recolors (many of them saved in 32 bit color). Thought it might effect how they look in game. It didn't. They look the same as before.  Presquoosh, with close to 6 gigs of much needed crap my game loaded in roughly 15 minutes.  Post squoosh with 2.73 GB I can't say I've noticed a big change in load time either way. But I'm starting to suspect a highly bloated walls file (which didn't compress all that dramatically) as being the big culprit. 

Do you have Inge Jones reserve bed hack? I usually leave a lot with all sims in their beds, then, after I install any expansion and go back to a lot, the sims are always standing by the side of their beds with motives just about maxed out. I don't have too many hacks installed and I've always wondered if Inge's hack was the one resetting itself (?) after installing an EP. To me it's no big deal, and having, say a father sim, NOT sleeping in his daughter's fairy princess bed, is worth any small inconvenience.That's IF this hack has anything to do with it.

Hey speed. Don't know if you nailed the problem or not. But in regard to question three, I also had really choppy game performance which I solved by disabling the games shaders (among other things they give the swimming pools that rippling water effect). Open the userStartup.cheat file and type in "boolProp useshaders false." I forgot where I picked up this tip, but it's the only thing that has worked in my case (I've a Gateway GT5028 w/an Athlon dual core processor 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce 6600 game card). My game performance has been great since. 

 The version listed is DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904). And yes, I've ran the tests and passed them all. However, I just noticed my sound acceleration was maxed out, I'll try bumping that down a notch and see what happens. I just remembered, in the lot I was playing before the last crash  the sound coming out of the  sims stereos was getting pretty choppy. Thanks for the links nectere, I'll check them out.

I have all of them installed.

 I'm having random crashes in neighboorhood view .It usually happens like this; I'll be scrolling ,the cursor will stop, the screen freezes then CRASH and either the system reboots (twice this happened) or it crashes to desktop (once, this last time). When it crashed this last time there was this error message: "Direct3D returned an error: D3DERR_NOT AVAILABLE. The application will now terminate." Also the moniter looked like it had reverted to 8 bit color (everything was fuzzy and the type was huge). I just bought this computer about a month ago.Its a Gateway 5028 with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ with 2.00 GHz and 1.00 GB of RAM. The graphics card is a GeForce 6600 with the latestdrivers.       My Operating System is Windows XP Media Center Edition Version 2002. Although when I run DirectX Diagnostic Tool it tells me my Operating System is Windows XP Professional 5.1 Build. (don't know if that means anything)  I know thanks to looking around this sight, that there are issues with the latest drivers for this graphics card (funky colored pillows,newspapers,ect) and I was wondering is the crashing related and what are my options? Please keep in mind I'm not by any stretch a computer pro but I am learning.