I'm still getting a crapload of professors, but the rest of the townie population is under control.

Yep. I have the latest Directors Cut (which includes: norespawn, nostrayrespawn, notownieregen, nodormieregen and antiredundancy).

Update: I think I'm either just way too impatient or way too impatient . Deleting in smaller batches (of 20-50 at a time) appears to have resolved the issue. I've also stopped deleting the superfluous, totally empty EA Games->The Sims 2 folder that generates every time I start the game. I don't know if that has anything to do with it...

Sloppyhousewife:

1. I deleted the associated character files from the My Documents after killing the SDSC, definitely.
2. I started from scratch about three or four times - you bet your sweet ass I have a backup of the neighbourhood. Pleasantview is my baby, I always have a backup. So I did undo the last step for Sim Creation Index reset.
3. The first go around, I deleted roughly 250 files. I waited about 15-20 minutes before killing it.
4. I did not touch any character files that were in the "Default" submenu: dead sims, PolliTech, Reaper et al, as well as any sims who had fathered playables. All I killed were service NPCs, strays, townies, downtownies, dormies, locals and a crapload of professors (really? 100 professors for a single university subhood?!).
5. See #2.

Again, I hate to necromance, but I am stumped.  

I followed the instructions to the T to delete some (okay, A LOT) of townies et al. in my 2-year-old Pleasantview. I got through the deletion process all right with the first batch (with roughly 850 files to delete, I wasn't doing them all at once), but when I tried to go back in-game to prep a second batch, it hangs up on the loading screen to the neighbourhood (both going into the main or a subhood), and I have to use Task Manager to shut it down.

I don't understand why this is happening. I don't THINK it's devolving into a BFBVFS, because the neighbourhood was running just fine prior to this. I still have backups of the neighbourhood files, so I can reinstall and redo if I need to. Does anybody have an idea of what's wrong?

ETA:  Bash me all you want. This is what I get for not reading three or four pages past the step-by-step instructions. I went into the UNK and not the SCID.

ETA2: Never mind. It still hangs up on the loading screen even when the SCID is used.

ETA3: Hangs up even when I don't bother with index reset.