I know the source of this information may be slightly dubious, what with all the know-nothing know-it-all 12 year olds who hang about there, but some folks on the BBS reckon that evil evil Securom 7 is the cause of the renewed BSOD problem.

LINK

Have a look at mone0615's comments.

Is this the same BSOD problem that started with OFB? Cos yer know, all I had to do to be able to play for more than 30 minutes at a time (and avoid all that delicious hard rebooting) was to fork out £70 for more memory (I believe that works out at about $5968 in American) whilst muttering darkly about evil tycoons and their champagne parties that I was probably funding. An extra gb of memory didn't actually fix anything, but it massively extended the amount of time the game would run for. I haven't had the problem since and I reckon I play for about 4-5 hours in one sitting.
I haven't really been following the BSOD saga since then as I assumed that Eaxis and Nvidia were still too busy, locked in heated squabble over whose responsibility it was, to actually fix the problem. And of course there are all those champagne parties they have to attend. So as with many things in life, the quick solution may be to assume that help is not forthcoming any time soon, and chuck good money after bad. Just a thought.

The OFB read me file says its a problem with the 6 series cards specifically and I use a GEForce 6800 GT. I have heard that using older drivers improves things slightly but the game still crashes in the end, it just takes 15 minutes longer to get to that point. I had graphics problems with Nightlife so I don't know why Im even vaguely surprised by all the trouble OFB is causing me!
I've decide that Im going to admit defeat and wait for my copy of Elder Scrolls Oblivion to arrive and play that instead. Damn Maxis and their crappy game to hell I say.

No. Mainly because I have no idea what/where/who it is. And although my other half claims he does know what/where/who hyperthreading is he's been singularly unable/unwilling to explain it to me and won't entertain the idea of turning whatever it is off. So I can't play the game until someone either at NVidia or Maxis fixes this. I'm amazed that this problem isnt all over the BBS but I really havent seen many folk complaining.

Installing the new drivers has made the problem even worse for me! Tried to play again last night and within 15 minutes the blue screen of death appeared, the flashing began and the only way out was to reset the pc. Am seriously @!?*ed off with it now. Had a look at the read me file that came with OFB and it states that Maxis are aware of a graphics conflict with 6 series Nvidia cards.So they were aware of the problem before the game out came out then. So what exactly is being done about it?!

Im having the same problem but I have a recent GEForce graphics card (6800 or thereabouts). Could it still be what's causing the problem? I had thought I'd narrowed it down to somethong amongst my huge number of downloads mucking things up. The only thing that seems common to every occasion of the blue screen of death is that I am playing at triple speed. And my supposed IT genius boyfriend didnt suggest the graphics drivers once.
I am beyond frustrated with this arsing game now. It's been one problem after another since installation. Typical that it should be the most interesting of the ex packs as well.

ETA - looking at the link danisja provided it would appear that its definitely a graphics card related issue as I was experiencing the neon pillow problem with Nightlife. Dammit dammit dammit.

I hate to break the awful news but the fantastic looking Oblivion game has been put back til next spring. Damn them, damn them all.

Oh, and thanks for the afros. Its about time the sim girls got 'funkay'.

Well, having applied a mixture of various folks advice, I seem to have finally fixed the problem more or less. No more teeth and eyeballs all over the control panel, and a dramatic reduction in sudden sim ugliness. Now there is only a momentary graphic distortion in the neighbourhood view once the game is loaded but thats it. It would appear that the other half's insistence that the drivers were completely up to date was based on complete and utter lies.

May I refer you to my earlier 'retarded' comment  .

Thanks for the suggestions folks. And glad you liked the story. I thought the mildly humorous approach would work better than using the torrent of expletives I originally planned.
The weird thing though is the game had been playing relatively ok (as far as TS2 goes ie a minimum of weirdo graphics thing) until I patched it. I'll definitely ask around the forums you mentioned but I cant work out why updating or rolling back drivers would affect the craziness with the control panel. Ive had all kinds of other freaky stuff happen to my game since patching it (blank thought bubbles, blank message boxes, can't ask anyone what they do for a living etc etc....) And there would definitely appear to be some issues with body shop.
Bangelnuts, what's easy info? And where would a computer retard like myself stumble across such a thing as an error log?

I have finally taken some pictures/screenshots of some of the graphics problems Im having. And despite showing up fine in game, for some reason the pictures are not showing up in the actual storytelling folder. So Ive collected together a few examples and packaged them as a story to the exchange. Itd be much appreciated if someone could maybe take a look and hazard a quess as to wtf is going on. If I cant get it sorted out Im going to give up altogether!

Link

Edit:

This is what I mean about the control panel spazzing out anyhow. If you look closely you can clearly make out teeth, eyes, ears and nostrils. Clicking on the 3 dots and back again usually corrects it. Weird though.

If you uninstall your game and burninate your hacks then reinstall the game and type sheepzR2Kewl then the game chooses a name for you.

Thats pretty much it, except mine were definitely more 'deformed'. Cool house though.

Thinking about it, it was the first time Id played uni after installing NL so maybe thats a factor. Also i think id ctrl-alt-deleted once the load screen started spazzing out and had pretty much forced the game to crash which may explain why it screwed up my desktop rather than the neighbourhood view itself. You may have guessed mind you that Im not chock full of technical know how!

This happened to me once after I installed NL. I had sent a sim to Uni and wanted to switch from downtown to playing my campus neighbourhood. It seemed to load but then the control panel started flashing up on the blue load screen and the game froze then crashed. It also totally screwed up my desktop settings so that the wallpaper appeared to have melted and the half the icons were missing! Restarting the pc was the only way I could sort that out. Ive since been able to switch neighbourhoods without issue but Ive never found out what caused the problem. However, my in game graphics do appear to be screwed in general at the moment.

Ive had the reverse thing happen in my game. Sometimes sims that had moved house would still show up on their original lot after a new famliy had moved in. But if id played the first family in the meantime and aged any of the children sims they would appear on their old lot as grotesque midgets. One of the weirdest was an adult male sim that was trapped in a childs body. He also appeared to have lopsided legs. I really wanted to keep him like that (for a bit of variety) but playing him on his current lot sorted him out. I did have some pretty funny pictures but since the death of my old hard drive theyve been lost.

Aah, now, there is a little problem with the fan (too old/noisy/other half keeps fiddling with it and making it worse). Could be it. The graphics problem you describe sounds similar. One thing I don't understand though is how skin bmp files (? I'm not too good with tech terms) end up all over the control panel. I'm still working on getting a screenshot of it. It's really very weird.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try and catch screenshot of the funky control panel malarkey next time I play. Also whilst playing last night I too seemed to be encountering the dreaded Jump Bug again, but I had been mucking about with the mailboxes on various lots so that may have been responsible for that. I reckon I'm gonna remove all my mods and see if that makes any difference. The graphics problem means the game is virtually unplayable at the moment. But it's all a massive pain in the arse really, and I am rapidly losing interest in the bloody game.

I'm not sure what you mean. Doesn't each expansion update the body shop location automatically? I've opened body shop independently of the game to see if that makes any difference.

OK.
Since installing the damn patch I've started having problems with my game that I didn't have before such as;

- blank dialogue box when asking a sim what they do for a living (I know this was a prob for some folk before but I never experienced it til patching my game)
- my graphics are screwed. I mentioned in another thread that I'm having trouble with the walls/floors/sim created paintings/sim's faces spazzing out. Now the control panel keeps breaking up, and more bizarrely becoming entirely covered in 'skin' files. (If someone can tell me how to take a screenshot and post it I'll do so next time it happens).
- buying clothes is next to impossible as the panel showing the clothes keeps breaking up and streaking, and for some unkown reason some of the custom clothes show up as a kind of distorted black catsuit when on the clothing dummy. Also the young adult icon doesn't show up in the clothing panel on university lots. Basically body shop seems to be screwed.

Is there anything I can do to sort this out? I'm pretty sick of it. Especially as we put in a brand new graphics card (GRForce 6800 GT)a month or so ago. I'm currently playing with my graphics turned down below what they were before the new graphics card. Is this happening to anyone else?

You just described my perfect xmas! I could really do without the family element of it all really. Too much stress!

I've had a nose round my downloads folder and I've got JMP's marriage-postmortum hack already (which has been cleared for NL use by Boris) which is why I can't understand why this has started happening again.

Are you following me Zephyr?! 
I realised immediately after posting my question that I thought I was in the NL bugs thread instead of this one. Sorry for the derailing!

Ive had a pretty spectacular fire involving crepe suzette and a sim with lousy cooking skills. It was almost fatal.

Can anyone confirm whether or not widowed sims should be able to remarry? I've not had a problem before now but have found that the 'propose...engagement/marriage' option is missing for a couple (Joe Carr and a CAS sim) where the CAS sim is widowed. And of course one of Joe's unrolling wants is to marry his girlfriend. Is this a bug?