Thanks, again I'm too lazy and on the wrong pc to check sims2, but here's the chunk from morrwind that deals with quadratic lighting (or not) and the settings.  The ini file then has a range of adjustments for each of the weather conditions in the exterior game cells.
don't know if it's relevant to you.
Improved lighting in MW comes by turning on quadratic and setting it to 1.7

[LightAttenuation]
UseConstant=0
ConstantValue=0.0
;
UseLinear=1
LinearMethod=1
LinearValue=3.0
LinearRadiusMult=1.0
;
UseQuadratic=0
QuadraticMethod=2
QuadraticValue=16.0
QuadraticRadiusMult=1.0
;
OutQuadInLin=0

Yep. The issue of improved or more realistic lighting has also been played with in the Morrowind modding community.  To highlight the application-specific adjustments, there is a large array of lighting adjustments/settings within morrowind.ini.  Obviously, this means that the default lighting configuration is loaded each time the game is started.  You can then use the game's editor to adjust any light source within the game as you like.  I haven't bothered to check if Sims 2 even uses an ini file, not many apps these days do. 

The fact that what you end up seeing can be adjusted at your monitor, or video card, or the card's driver, or the application itself, is probably the reason Maxis went for the lowest common denominator approach.  There are way too many variables to ensure a consistent result.  The discussion here amongst a dozen or so posters all with varying results reinforces this.

If you're going to continue this project and I think it would be worthwhile, it may be an idea to consider doing it as a 'lighting tutorial' rather than a 'mod'.

If you haven't already tried, monitors should have a 'factory default' or reset option hidden somewhere.