I buy the totally harmless bit, but is it really cosmetic?  This was a daytime "look through", and when a Sim's picture shows up in the thought bubble, that Sim shows up on the lot to lecture the voyeur.   (This is one of my favourite effects, especially when the voyeur is wussy crybaby and the spied-upon Sim is a vampire, and the lot is pessimized for the latter's quick traversal.  Could thefightclub lead to a decline in the vampire population thanks to daytime telescope use?  Whee!  Unfortunately the vampires don't stay around long enough to turn to dust).

Strangely, I have the totally opposite experience: Aspyr's ports are more stable than EAXis in Windows on the same (Mac) platform, and certainly stable enough that since I don't need to run into all the early annoyances in the latest expansions, and I do other things in OS X anyway rather than having a single dedicated gaming system, so switching back and forth is just not worthwhile for me.   I can move the ~/Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/ directory back and forth in order to do SimPE stuff as necessary, and I can do that in VMware or Parallels.   

Otherwise, "what you said".

Aha, if this is a generalizable shiny that causes resets to affect actions-in-progress but not motives (or ACR base times or asp scores or the like), then it is very shiny indeed.   (I mean "generalizable" in the sense that it could prevent motive resets caused by the installation and removal of experimental awesomeware, as well as typical non-awesome and (crossing fingers) EAxis cruft without having to coordinate with the cruft-writers at all.)

I think the last reset I had was when I infested my Macintoy with BV or perhaps a subsequent update of one of the small furry animal killing devices.  Terminated sleep + motive reset + ACR = Bonoboland.   Fappability decreases asymptotically with the number of such monkeyhouses visited.  After ten or so, I begin to ask myself if The Sims 2 would be better with more STDs than mere pregnancy.   

On the bright side, autonomycontrol lets me simulate microbial infections that affect the CNS in ways that cause aversions and maybe phobias analogously to how Toxoplasma gondii and the like can cause OCD.  The absence of a contagion mechanism is awfully non-parsimoniously theistic in a "free-willed" simverse (Player: "Naughty sim, you woohooed the town bicycle, now you have a disease which prevents you from using toilets!").   On the other hand, a small constant probability per woohoo is justifiable (e.g. mechanical chafing leads to infection from pathogens endemic to the sim environment; no need for sim-to-sim transmission, so no need for any checks on woohoo history) for those that are inclined to roll dice or consult PRNGs.

Neat.  It popped sleeping sims out of bed, but did not reset motives.  The menus are kinda deep, and I think the menu would flow more naturally with this ordering: Autonomy > object > Add > Proscription > Personal, however I may change my mind as I impose more divine laws on my playthings.

No error log was generated (not even in debug mode).

All MATY stuff I use is current.

More specifically what happens is that as I visit each lot for the first time after installing autonomycontrol, sims who were in the middle of doing things at save time are no longer doing them.  This is most obvious for sims who were asleep (which is my commonest case of "doing things" at save time) are suddenly standing by their beds in whatever they wore to sleep in the first place.   Toddlers that had been undergoing forced skillination are found a square away from the toys hey had been using, stowed infants have leaked onto the floor.

If a remotely useful looking iota of attachable information drops iteself onto my filesystem when I visit an as yet unvisited lot, I will add it here.

Re-checked versions and visited an as-yet-unvisited-since-installing-autonomycontrol lot.   OETreeDelete.xls is the only log file that has grown, and it contains only the usual junk.   You can have it if I am underestimating its utility, though.

This is not a reset catastrophe as tends to happen when installing killers of young mammals; motives remain the same as do Base Times and the like from your favourite Abomination.   I am happy to integrate this in my head as "Wtf! Earthquake!" dumping the neighbourhood's underslept and underwashed sims into postures that would make Boltzmann happy.   He already chuckles at the temperature differences between adjacent lots and his resemblance to El Presidente.

Well, since it's a wish list, I can be unrealistic with respect to the franchise in the hands of EAxis...

1. Outright baby sex selection.   There is nothing more annoying than birth-sequence/exit-without-saving loops when the sadorandom sequence produces a -long- string of the wrong sex of baby.

2. More inherited traits, and better expression of these traits in offspring.  Steal "algorithms" from real world mammalian sexual reproduction.  There should be hooks for in-game creation of "knockout" Sims along the lines of knockout mice in labs.   A bioengineering career track with a gene splicer reward should be in game, along with obvious buyable objects like cages of mice and Waring blenders.

3. More acquired traits (that are not inherited) -- not just an extension of "habits" and "phobias", but also scars, missing limbs, liver disease... not just wearable clothes or yellow bodypaint.     There should be hooks for in-game brainwashing and psychotherapy that adjust non-inheritable personality traits, clothing preferences, attractions, LTWs, STW roll result probabilities, and so forth.   Being a Cult Leader should be MEANINGFUL.

4. Variations in common animations.   Put more actors in motion capture suits. 

5. Voice variation.  Put more actors in front of microphones.

6. In game hooks to compose animations.   It doesn't have to be easy, it just has to be there.   Even if it requires building a data structure with X,Y,Z coordinates for each mesh node for each frame, at least someone will animate something entertainingly naughty.   Strings for our puppets! 

7. As mentioned by others, the signalling system on which free will is based is backwards.   Sims should have preferences, objects shouldn't. 

8. There are plenty of multi-core machines on the market now.   Use them.   Also, scale subtlety from highest end Mac Pro down to minimum equipment list; design big and leave no idle computrons behind, but prune off computations and renderings of things lower end systems can't cope with.   You know, like other PC games tend to do.

and
and

... are not mutually exclusive statements.  In fact, at least the last two of these are true.

You could always suggest he check out the wikipedia article on SecuROM.   That suggestion should not annoy his inner geek nearly as much as what is described in the article.

You can move your Mac "The Sims 2" directory in and out of a Windows system.   I do this from time to time to make in-game facial surgeries on insufficiently good looking Sims be inheritable by those Sims' offspring.

If you are unaverse to Arring VMware or Parallels (for Intel Macintoys) or VirtualPC (for PowerPC Macintoys) and can install a (preferably Arred!) Windows XP in that, then you can install a Windows version of TS2 (and all the same EPs you have) in that.   DO NOT RUN THE GAME IN THE VIRTUAL MACHINE.

You can then use Finder > File > Compress in your user Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 directory, which creates a .zip, which you can import (probably just by dragging) into your Windows virtual machine My Documents directory.   Unzip it there, and then install SimPE and whatever other tools you like.

Edit, fold, spindle, mutilate and conflict checker at will.   You could probably even run the game, but I don't trust EAxis code enough to let it touch anything I might possibly want to reimport into the Aspyr-fixed version on my Mac -- I have horrible visions of unnecessary byte sex flipping, catastrophic XML rewriting, and especially arbitrary file name changing.   If you're *just* doing conflict checking or the "manual binary search" method, then you're not going to reimport anything, so running the game or deleting files willy-nilly is harmless.  Just don't reimport the result.

When you're done in the rich world of third party external tools that are sadly unlikely ever to be ported to the Mac, *if* you're made changes you want to use in your game, just zip up the Windows game directory, import the Windows-made .zip back into your Mac, delete your old Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 directory, and finally unzip the Windows-made .zip in Documents/EA Games.

Finally, fire up your Mac game, visit several lots where you can see if the changes you made work (exit without saving from the first couple of those unless you are very trusting), and hopefully It Just Worked.

Be sure to use backups.   Occasionally zipping up the The Sims 2 directory (and putting the date and some notes into the file name) is a good policy and has saved my bacon (or at least my game) a couple of times, as has Time Machine.