Thanks so much Haley, using that program worked great. I yanked out my last ones downloaded and low and behold that was the problem.  It was a curved staircase set from TSR. It's a shame they didn't work for me... I thought they were nice.

Ok, at some point I have apparently downloaded custom stairs that my game doesn't agree with.  When I'm in build mode I click on the stairs icon and.... crash... every time.  I thought it might be just a coincidence that it crashed when I clicked the icon but I changed houses and got the same thing (several times).

My question is: Since looking through my massive downloads folder trying to find anything with stairs in the name is proving to be useless, is there a better way to find out the problem that's causing the crashes?

Ahh ok, I got it. Thanks so much 

OK, sorry if this is a stupid question and feel free to point and laugh if you must... but I'm not seeing an option to play it in a window instead of full screen.  Is it there and I completely missed it or is there a trick to doing it?

Well rolling back to my previous drivers seemed to fix the blue screen issue. But it's hard to tell because unfortunately I don't get to play long before it crashes.    I never thought about playing it in a window instead of full screen, I'll try that next and see if it helps.

Thanks everyone 

I could deal with doing it only every few hours but I get it every few minutes.  I'll just go back to the old drivers and see if that helps.

Well I'm running the game on an old spare computer I had sitting around so the specs are pretty bad. lol

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
NVidia GeForce 6600 GT
1GB RAM

I only use it for Sims and it's played fine until recently.  Hmm but now that you mention it, I did update the video drivers a few days ago.  Is that possibly the problem?

Ok, I'll attempt to explain the problem I'm having and hopefully someone will have an idea of what I'm talking about and what's going on. 

Lately I have been having a major problem with the game crashing (not uncommon from what I've read here) BUT, I started the game up today and while playing, at random times, the blue screen will pop up and the cursor turns to the spinning hourglass. (like it does when you're loading).  After about a minute or so of doing that the game will resume. As if that wasn't annoying enough the last time it did that my monitor shut off during the blue screen.  The only way it would come back on was to reboot the computer.

It only does this while playing Sims so I'm not sure what the problem is... software or hardware. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this problem because I'm completely at a loss on figuring this one out.   

Thanks, I'll check it out. And there's umm... no problem with the over 18 part. 

I'm sure this question will be worthy of a public flogging (or worse) but I would be extremely grateful if someone can point me to the direction of a working no censor blob hack/patch. 

I've done a search and the only ones I'm finding are sending me to a nonfunctional MTS2 link. 

I have all expansions up to Seasons.

Thanks in advance.