At the moment (pre-masses of expansion packs) 4GB RAM is more than enough - today I dropped down to 2GB to troubleshoot some BSODs and the difference is barely noticeable. Just in case you needed any more reason to get the ASUS. 

There's not much to discuss, your one guess at the cause turned out to be wrong. Of course I'm thinking that since the solution was on an EA forum, you don't believe a word of it.
Good luck on solving your crashing problem.  

Why waste time removing that code when leaving it in causes no problems? If they had removed it, that's time lost that could have gone towards fixing bugs. TS3 and Spore use the same debugging tool. That's all. It's a non-issue. Look for something else to blame.

The DLL is only for testing/debug purposes. The game functions fine without it and it is unrelated to the cause of your crashes. See: http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/17060.page On the first page of your Google results, no less.

It is something in the registry, but it most certainly isn't a bug with BV. I had this happen way back when either Uni or NL was the latest EP. It's just one of those weird rare bugs that nobody seems to have really figured out, and has existed since base game.

Fullscreen: Alt + Enter once you've loaded the program.
Is it possible to run BS at a res above 1024x768?

The house: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=189165
I just remember it being a featured item and went rummaging. xD

As for your animation problem.. I'm not quite awesome enough to know what that is. Best I can think of is something similar to the chessboard glitch where you can cancel playing and your sim's arm will be stuck in an upwards grabby position.

What about the coat rack that comes with this EP?

1GB RAM is low? I could run giant lots with that much (I have 2GB now) with little problem. Either your video card or your processor is the bottleneck here...

Anyway, I don't know about the actual capacities of the rinks. I've had about 8 sims on the small one once. The only problem was that the animations got all jumpy because it couldn't handle so many sims blading and falling smoothly, so some sims snapped into a backwards skating anim or popped infront of a sim that's fallen over, etc.

They're on MTS2:
http://www.modthesims2.com/member.php?u=397827
http://www.modthesims2.com/member.php?u=127162

The toning is an effect similar to that seen on vampires, so it works on custom skintones just fine.
My default replacements for skins (Lin's v. of SimCribbling skins), eyes, and brows also work without a problem.

I get this every so often too, typcially on large lots.. it's like the game has too much crap crammed into memory and orders a time out. I've had them last for up to a minute. Doubt it's overheating.

Bowing down to the kitty god. *no idea what those cat statues represent, really*
Or mimicing the pose. Cuuute, either way 

I've had something like this happen to me once. Character filenames were having something tacked onto the end of them, rendering them unreadable by the game and resulting in vacant houses. The only thing that fixed it was a manual uninstall (deleting registry entries etc. instructions are on TS2 official site) and then reinstall of the entire shebang.

I really hope it never happens to me again. ~~; I went looking everywhere for an answer, and found a big thread about it on Variousimmers where they were complaining that this gamekiller wasn't fixed. It would be over a year old by now, if VS is still around...

Lin's edit of Loius' skintones (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=175159). Previously I'd been using defaults made in SimPE with the original version of those skins, and changed to Lin's version because of this problem.

Hummmm it seems this... was only affecting the light tan skintone. Switching the kid's skin to that of her fathers (which was the dark tan) and using the mirror fixed her.
I say 'was' because I recall ages ago that I had zombie faces on the kids CAS thumbnails, and was using a zombie skin replacement. I deleted that and everything is back to normal. xD It's not like I ever bother to make zombies anyway, I suppose.

Fish Dude, that is scary. 

Yeah, it's no good.
With no new default skins package in place, the kid's entire body is white. D:

Did think about putting this in the thread about the elder thumbnails in CAS with white faces but it's probably an unrelated problem, so. ^^;

Faces are white with a red cross over them and code refering to a missing/corrupted(?) somethingorother. ?_PUFACE_S2_#?
CAS sims of these ages aren't affected, only townies and kids born in-game. I'm using new default skintones, but swapping them out doesn't change anything (infact it made it worse..), nor does using the mirror to edit face.
CAS thumbnails also show black faces for these ages.

Screenshot: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v34/Ziibly/snapshot_d226deab_f229682a.jpg

One of those 'reinstall time' things?

Notownieregen doesn't affect service NPCs, they'll regenerate normally.

Go to My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Config, and open userstartup.cheat with Notepad. You're looking for something like 'boolprop UseShaders false'. Put a # in front of that line so the game ignores it.

Of course, if you're using the lighting mod (with Gunmod's pixel shaders) then it's probably a good idea not to change that unless you're taking that mod out...

Since last post I have..

1. Deleted some custom windows & doors I never use
2. Turned pixel shading back on in userstartup.cheat (the lighting mod disabled it, right? I removed the thing, got sick of the darkness)
3. Started a new hood.

My OFB windows now let light in. .__. My pools are also now very shiny xD So it was one of those that fixed it...

Moved out entire download folder, problem remained. Seems strange though, because I'm sure I remember at least the modern-y shop windows letting light in when I first got OFB. Maybe a patch broke them?

It's not my graphics card. I'm on a GeForce 6600, all settings are on high except for anti-aliasing (because it's ugly) and the game runs like a dream ^^;

This seems to be limited to OFB windows, anyway. A few downloaded ones have this effect but I suppose it depends on what they were cloned from in the first place.

Example of my problem:



This was happening before and after GunMod's lighting thingee (I installed it to see if it fixed it xD). I have nooo idea what could have caused this. The only things I've downloaded lately besides clothing, hair etc. is the College Adjuster.

I do recall a table I downloaded once ages ago actually affecting the item it was cloned from. Could it be another case of this? I'll have to move out some of my downloaded windows and see what's going on. But if anybody has any ideas besides that, it would help XC

What we need is a program external to TS2 that lets us plot down walls on a lot, and let us view it (a simple top-down view) alongside the source house plan. Yep.
Or I could stop being lazy and just print the blasted things.