Thanks, Nanacake. The only modification was the creation and placement of the other sim, which did not require any hack or cheat code. I created the sim (no custom content) and added them to a household. When the sim from Sunset Valley went to visit, the sim I created in France appeared as the food vendor in the café.

I'm thinking the relationship has messed up being able to travel back and forth - a seperate neighborhood is able to travel back and forth with no problem.

My only played household in Sunset Valley is able to go on vacations everywhere but France. The household is able to select France as a destination and get into the departing vehicle, the neighborhood screen loads, then about a minute into it I get a skip in the music that goes on for about eight seconds and the game crashes.

When I started this neighborhood, I created a sim in France for my main character to meet and maybe hook up with. When my main travelled to France, they did meet and after the vacation was over the main sim invited the French sim over and they did, in fact, get married. Both have careers and travelled frequently to all destinations, including France.

Then with no apparent trigger, I was sending the French sim to vacation in France the game crashed as in the first paragraph in this post. I restarted the computer, emptied the caches with the same result. I then tried the main sim and got the same load screen then crash. I even tried sending both and got the aniticipated crash.

I would appreciated it if anyone that has experienced this and found a work-around or cure could help me out here, or am I pretty much screwed until another patch comes out?

Yay, vodka!

Honestly, each EA patch and update should be required to list dire side effects like the prescription drug commercials, "May cause migranes, dizziness and sudden loss of bowel control...", "Okay, I'm not sneezing, but I've got the worst headache ever, have soiled my britches and have fallen down in traffic."

Sorry, didn't mean to summon you - I had read earlier in the thread where you were not able to recreate this problem in your own game environment. I've read through the thread and tried everything that even made remote sense to me, and have gotten the pauses to an acceptable level. Of course there are other issues now, but what would this game be without the strategic addition of having to work around the random, reoccurring glitch?

I'm another with the sudden stops when the sims head out for work and/or school. The babysitters also freeze at the door, quite permanently until the parents come home. I have AM and Indie installed but use only Indie wittingly. I will have to check out what Spineraker posted above and see if anyone in the house has the Supreme Commander stamp.

I've had very few issues prior this, but can tell you that the above posters reporting it taking more than an hour to get their sims down a flight of stairs into the waiting carpool or bus are not exaggerating.

Edit/Update: Okay, familiarized myself a bit more with the Awesomemod and found the Configuration Tool. I disabled the Supreme Commander features and it seemed to help a little, making me think that it's not the primary part of the last patch that's bumping heads codewise. I tested in a family of four over a period of five sim days and I did check in the game to be sure none of the family members were following a Supreme Commander script.

J.M. is leagues above me in coding and solving game systems difficulties, I'm sure. I'll continue watching this thread to see if anyone else who's having this problem comes up with a fix, I'm just tossing my info out there hopefully to spark some sort of solution. If I do come up with anything (entirely by accident, I'm sure) I'll be sure to update once again.