@ piratesforlunch: Did you have Supreme Commander enabled for any sims in your saved game?If so,this may be the reason that you cannot play it without Awesomemod.Try starting a new neighbourhood and see if that works.
I've never enabled it, but this time before I started up my game I removed the awesomemod and the .dll file (I had never removed the .dll file before) and at least I got the loading screen. It froze though. Is that some improvement? I'm definitely not a computer person.
Thanks