I went ahead and uninstalled the entire game and did a fresh install, which fixed my problem right up. Thanks so much for your help!

I wrestled with installing The Sims 3 last night, plus WA, HELS, and Ambitions. I finally got it figured out, including digging in the registry and changing the SKU to get around the regional code nonsense.

Now I'm getting a bunch of graphical errors - nothing positively game-breaking, but all quite annoying and only somewhat hindering.

1) The initial loading screen is fucked all to hell. There's no logo, the text that scrolls across the bottom is unreadable... it's like it exploded, it's a bright light. But I can see the loading bar at least, and it does load fine and go to the game selection menu.

2) When looking at the "Edit Town" menu and other things with the blue background (such as the tooltips of "always" "later" and "never" variety in the top right), there is no blue background and some buttons are missing icons. Also in Buy Mode and other places where there are tabs of items, there is the occasional tab with no symbol or checkbox without text beside it. Here's an example screenshot:

http://i45.tinypic.com/2yy1t1i.jpg

3) The washers and dryers are neither selectable or place-able. I see them in my Buy Mode tab, I can see their price if I hover over them, but not their name or description. So far, those are the only items I noticed with the problem, but there may be more.

I have not installed any hacks, this is a fresh install of the game. I will be attempting to reinstall at least Ambitions, since it seems like it may be the main issue.

Has anyone else run across anything similar? Any advice?

I spent hours trying to figure this out, reading and re-reading this thread so I didn't have to hassle someone with inane questions.

I figured out that the included Resources.cfg file had not included the one line needed, which pointed in the direction of the file. (Or maybe it did, I just accidentally pasted over the original file in my frantic attempts to get things to work.)

If you are pasting your *.dbc files into your The Sims 3/Mods/DCCache folder, you need to have the following line in your Resources.cfg:

PackedFile Mods/DCCache/*.dbc

That points it to the correct destination. Like many people found, you don't need the *.dbc files pasted in two different locations.

I'm sorry if this is reiterating information in this thread on accident (like I said, I read through but I mighta missed something..), but if I was having trouble with it, maybe someone else was, too.