The autosave "feature" is worse than utter useless shit. It's evil. Use "save as," and often.

I had the same problem. It was probably voodoo, but disabling "lessons" in game options fixed it for me.

I've had both types of freezes. The freeze that eventually ends on its own has always been fixed by resetting the world and has probably been caused by stuck sims.

I also, rarely, get the freeze that never ends which requires me to end task to get out of it. When I get those freezes there is always a tool tip stuck on screen; I've either changed speeds or been about to, or I've hovered over something, such as a sim, that causes a tool tip to appear, and then it freezes.

My sim bought a cake from a kid in the park who had set up a stand. There was no option to eat the cake, and I couldn't take it out of his inventory and put it in the fridge or any place else. The only option was to "clean up," which of course gave my sim a negative moodlet for wasting food. I seem to recall having the exact same problem with the TS2 OFB bakery (minus the moodlet, of course,) in the beginning, so I was more nostalgically amused than annoyed, really.

On another note, one of the things that has annoyed me most about TS3 from the start was what would happen if I directed my sim to perform a social action with another sim: When the social was done, the two sims would stand there like idiots shuffling their feet and whistling at the sky for the next sim hour. Now, since I installed AMB, I'm having a difficult time getting anything romantic going with a pair of sims. I tell my sim to flirt with the other sim, and he does so, and immediately as soon as the flirt is done, she retaliates with some gossip or a funny face, which of course sends them back to "Fred thinks Ethel is okay." So they never get past "flirty." Oh well. If I have to cheat them into relationships, that's still better than all that time they were wasting before, kicking dirt and examining clouds.

Other than those two things, and one CTD that I'm pretty sure I caused by doing something stupid, I'm finding that the entire game is greatly improved for me by the addition of AMB.

That's what I figured, and why I skipped that step. I never lost the Riverview installed content, just the town.

This worked for me, except that I didn't bother with step 3---all I did was move the Riverview.world file, and delete the two files from the world caches folder. Riverview now seems to be working fine, and my two saved Riverview games reappeared. What is the purpose of step 3?

I had this problem also. Getting rid of my full-body replacement skin tone and switching to a face-only replacement skin tone seems to have fixed it.

16 million color options that don't matter anyway because of the crappy lighting.

Courtney can be either male or female. It's one of many names that were simply surnames, occasionally given to boys in honor of their mothers' maiden names, and then became "trendy" as female names in the 1960's and '70's.

Yes.

In my game every time I start a new instance of Sunset Valley, Dustin Langerak--a married adult with two children--is listed as an elementary school student. I haven't attempted to do anything about it because the first time it happened I was interested to see if he'd try to ride the school bus with his children. He didn't, and I was kind of disappointed, but nothing else unusual happened, either. Dustin was able to get a job and go to work on schedule, and the "elementary school student" thing went away on its own. The next time I started a new version of Sunset Valley I checked in on the Langeraks again, and sure enough, Dustin once again believed himself to be an elementary school student, and once again, the situation fixed itself without any intervention from me. So you might want to save the game--just in case--and try playing the sim through a few days to see if it'll fix itself.

I've got at least 2 born-in-game sims in my neighborhood with the tealdeer trait.  I did not choose the trait for either of them, they just lucked into it on their own. That's the only odd trait I've seen, but I've definitely seen it at least twice. Personally I like it, it's right up there with the night that everyone rode tiny bicycles. . . I wouldn't want the pedophile trait to start turning up randomly though.

The SC4 Terraformer. Wonderful thing, because it made it simple to terraform an entire map at once, rather than having to do it town-by-town and then deal with reconciling the edges.

EA probably figures that if they don't provide a 'hood editor, they can use "includes a new neighborhood!" as a selling point for each EP. That would be typical of EA, right? Attempting to get us excited about paying for things that should have been included in our original purchase. 

If the story mod spits out a notification to the player that a sim is pregnant, and the player does not go and add a crib to the sim's home, the mother could just have a spontaneous miscarriage. Like internal dingos. That would work, AND it would offend various people (BONUS!). More realistic, too, because IRL, people generally buy cribs after they become pregnant, not before. 

Seriously though, I'd prefer to just have the ability to globally set a maximum number of children per household, and maybe be able to set some special cases individually.  My reason is that if my neighborhood starts to get overpopulated, I don't want the "solution" to be that I have to run around from house to house deleting cribs...and then add them all back again when the neighborhood isn't populated enough.  It seems that the result is the same either way--adding or removing cribs is simply a clunkier way of raising or lowering the maximum number of children per household setting.

How about some sort of evil compromise:
We can configure the maximum number of kids per household.
If we select and make active a household that has babies/toddlers and no cribs we have 2 sim hours to add cribs.
If cribs are not added in the allotted time, the social worker comes--or the dingos, whatever--and takes not only the babies but also any other children the household has--because it's an unfit home.
The parents are sent to jail on child neglect/abuse charges.
The repo man shows up and confiscates most of the family's net worth--to pay fines and lawyers.
The sims are forever after randomly boo'ed and hissed at by random sims on the street, and occasionally attacked. They find it VERY difficult to make friends.  They are also unable to get a job in medicine, law enforcement, or politics. Their job performance climbs VERY slowly in ALL careers--as a consequence of their bad reputation.
All this can apply to houses that have children and not enough BEDS, as well, because that's just as bad, really.
This way, those of us who play the entire town have a real incentive to make sure that there actually are cribs and beds, while people who play legacy style with just one household aren't bothered with buying cribs for sims who are--for them---NPCs.

Actually, with immigration set to "off" for the entire time, and using just the sims that were already in Sunset Valley, the population in my game is stable and reasonable. There are a few families that breed like rabbits, but others that have only one or two children, and quite a few babies grow up and never marry or reproduce themselves, so it's evened out pretty nicely. I tried the same thing with immigration "on" though, and yeah, it was a mess. 

To me, "somewhere in the middle" between Indie and Awesome would mean something like this:  Indie is just pure chaos.  Awesome is pure logic. I think realism falls somewhere in between. For instance,  Indie regularly pairs YAs up with elderly mates for no good reason. I'd imagine that the finished ASM would never allow this to happen. Personally, I think it should happen once in a very great while--if the YA in question has a "gold digger" LTW and the elderly mate is rich, it would make perfect sense. A "family-oriented" sim who marries a "dislikes children" sim should stand a really good chance of winding up divorced after one or two children. Two "dislikes children" sims who marry one another should have an extremely small chance of ever having a child at all.

I think that one of the things that Indie did "right" though was to make it so configurable, and pretty easy (if annoying) to set up to suit almost anyone's taste. No two people are likely to agree on how much romance is too much or how much is not enough, for instance, and Indie lets the player decide between a range of progression speed settings, or turning things like romance off altogether. 

I had a notification that a female sim who I knew to be married was meeting up for romance with someone I knew wasn't her husband. I checked in on her, and I was correct. It was her nephew-by-marriage. I let it go because I thought it was funny--she has the "family oriented" trait, and she'd certainly oriented on family for cheating purposes.   

I had that one a while back, and it was apparently a problem caused by the last neighborhood I had played going corrupt. I solved it by deleting that neighborhood from the saved games folder.

Razor. I had deleted the EA library sims, and had to return them to the library before the patch installed. Immediately after patching, I had to reset a batch of sims that were stuck in some kind of work/home limbo.  After that, no problems, *no issues, no pathing problems, no lag, no invisible sims, no obvious changes, other than the fact that random sims now visit the sims I'm playing.  I didn't necessarily want this, but whatever.

*Well, I wasn't having any issues, until tonight when I ran CCleaner, finally got around to letting some Vista updates install after putting it off for months, and upgraded my video drivers, which I had purposely not been updating because the older drivers worked better with TS2. I didn't add or delete anything from the game itself.  NOW I have what Pescado referred to as the "Old Car Syndrome" crash, after not having had that problem in weeks. The peculiarities of this game amaze me. 

There's an entire thread about it right near here. In fact, I'm surprised you didn't trip over it.

Changing the DynamicAvoidance seemed to make a big difference in my game. Interestingly, however, changing it to 0 caused my game to randomly CTD during gameplay--which it had never done before.  Changing it to something more than zero, but less than the original value works fine, with no CTD after extensive play. More voodoo, probably.

Oh, mine are active, but if I select, for instance, a random sim in the park playing chess, about half the time I will find that that particular sim is skipping work, hungry, has to pee, and hates the outdoors. Then I switch to some random house and find a sim who has the day off, is in a great mood, and loves the outdoors, standing in the corner of her foyer staring at the wall.  It annoys me that the game doesn't do a better (more logical) job of choosing which sims to populate public areas.

I've occasionally seen them napping on park benches before, but not often. The thing is though, this sim was obviously dead tired, and quite smelly. She SHOULD have gone home. The game doesn't seem to allow them to attend to their needs, even if they were smart enough to.  If the game decides it wants a particular sim to be in the park, or standing outside the hospital, etc., the sim has to do so.  I'd much rather see sims at the park because they are in a good mood, love the outdoors or fishing, or (imagine!) rolled a wish to play guitar in the park and had sense enough to act on it. 

Hah, yeah, I was thinking "voodoo" when I replaced the families but you know, if voodoo works, I'll go with voodoo.

Mine bitched about a file not being found, so I put the pre-made families back into the library, and it installed just fine.
The game started up fine, the neighborhood loaded fine.
The only problem I've had--that I've discovered, anyway--is that I had a boatload of sims who were stuck outside their places of work. They'd been at work when I saved last before installing the patch and new AM. Their shifts had all been over for hours--or maybe an entire day--their motives were in the red, and they were stuck there in their uniforms, with the "work" tone selector/progress bar still up.  Canceling it and telling them to go home did nothing. I had to find and reset each and every one of them, and if there is a way to reset every sim in the whole damn town at the same time I wish I had known about it.
Oh and there was a stray limo stuck outside City Hall. Otherwise, everything seems fine so far.
Remarkably smooth install for an EA patch, really.

That makes two of us, but I have to admit that I do get the occasional snicker out of trying to make sense of the "flirtatious joke" or whatever that interaction is called.