I didn't even try loading the game before adding the CC to it, so it's possible that some file was corrupt beforehand and I didn't notice.  (Oh, and I meant Sunset Valley, I believe.  Whatever the basic neighborhood is called.  Not sure why I wrote Pleasantville.)  All gameplay features I can tell work just fine; the game simply seems incapable of writing a save it can actually open later on.

At this point, I'm leaning toward there being something wrong with my patches or crack.  The only explicitly hack-style CC I was using was Awesomemod, but it I gather is entirely possible that some kind of, I don't know, mangled clothing file could have damaged something somehow.

Bah.  Looks like I'm reinstalling if I want to play again...

I recently decided to reinstall the game after 'acquiring' HELS and Ambitions.  Got everything in, patched up, installed awesomemod and the 3booter/FPS limiter set.  Went to check out a few things in the game, and everything appears to work fine for my test sim.  I then went on a hunt for interesting custom content and installed a few other things.  The next time I booted the game and went to load my test game, I got this message:  "A serious error has occurred while loading "savegame.sims3". Restarting the program is strongly recommended."

I assumed it was due to the CC I'd just acquired, so I kicked it out of the folder (I'm using the My Documents folder method) and started over with a CC-less game in Pleasantville.  Still no dice - a very bland test game there fails to load as well.

Apart from removing all my custom stuff, I've tried using a cracked .exe, using awesomemod's CD check skip, and running the game as Admin. I'm running Win7 64-bit, on a 2.6 ghz Core2Quad, 6 GB of ram and a Radeon HD 5850.  I'm not seeing any kind of logs appearing in any directory in the way that they might in the event of an actual program crash.

Anyone have any idea what the hell causes this?  Unless something went wrong in the patching process somehow, I have no idea what could cause this; the game is recently installed, after all.  I'm contemplating reinstalling to see if that helps, but at this point I'm feeling more inclined to just uninstall the damned thing for good.

Hmm, just had an error 13 after an hour or two of non-saving work (aka. foolishness).  Tried deleting the ".bad" versions and the save itself, then making a new one, which caused the game to CTD.  Lovely.

Oh, and now my other save refuses to load.

I think this may be the last straw.  Good thing the price was right on this game, at least.

Hmm, this looks promising.  I was able to add the child-parent relationships with the mod and the parents were easily cheated back up to wedding-status.  Call the extra ceremony "renewing their vows", or something. Thanks.

FYI, in case anyone was wondering, under win7 the SKU key is in HKLM/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/Sims/The Sims 3.  I suspect it may be lurking there for vista users as well.

I'm almost positive I have the newest version of the mod.  I downloaded it two days ago, and there shouldn't be any cached versions in my browser... but oh well.  I see there is a new version up today, anyway.

I'll try the mirror method, thanks.

I was making a large family of sims and had finally put the finishing touches on.  However, when I clicked over to the relationship screen, the "assign relationships" box refused to work.  I could drag the pictures around, but the pop-up boxes that should have shown up when two sims are connected didn't appear.  Additionally, the family member icons stuck to the cursor, even after I cancelled out of the relationship editor screen.  I more or less accidentally clicked "Continue" after trying the editor several times, with no luck.  The net result is that I now have a large family of orphan roommate sims instead of the extended clan idea I had in mind.

So, clearly something is weird here.  My question, then, is if there is any way to edit this family again after-the-fact.  I know AwesomeMod has an "Edit in CAS!" command for individual sims in the debugging menu; is there something similar that will let me reassign household relationships?

Given the possibly-bug-infested proceedings here, maybe I ought to just consign this instance of the family to the trash and re-make them, but I don't really feel like re-doing seven different sims at the moment...