It's very satisfying, especially after following all those instuctions and tinkering blindly in the unknown.

It worked! The car did drive along the far pavement a little, but that's nothing moving the portal around a bit won't fix. And it was the delivery guy I have lined up to marry one of my teen daughters, so they can get to know each other! Thank you all again for your wonderful help.

Yes, I realise I was being pretty pedantic. It helps to know that there are two different types of portals, though - I think one of them's broken and the other isn't.

I'll stop fannying around and install them both. NOW. Thank you all for your help and patience.

The most relevant fixes I've found are this one by Crammyboy which is preventative but doesn't fix, and this one by Erzengel which fixes, but mentions carpools not showing up, which doesn't accurately describe my problem - it's the NPCs that don't turn up, not the carpools, which are fine. Are those the ones you were talking about?

Thank you for your flattery regarding know-how, but the above blundering sort of disproves it 

And these fixes are utterly cushty-woo and will not burninate my game in the slightest?

Ah. You are completely right. My sims just called for a food delivery and have been inundated with offworld loiterers, but no food delieveries. Where do I go to download the fix?

No worries - I decided to just move them out and in again, which seems to have worked. I think you're right, though - it happened after a cock-up involving a delivery van.

And sweetheart, I never employ nannies! If the parents aren't high enough on their career tracks to have enough days off between them to care for the infant themselves, they take alternate days off. I will not have a madwoman razing my house to ashes while I'm at work.

My legacy lot is being constantly bombarded with offworld loiterers, with one generated every few sim minutes. Short of constantly clearing them with the FFS lot debugger or moving the family into a different lot, what can I do?

Thank you for your help 

My Mac, by the way, if anyone's interested (but, yaknow, I'm going to show it you you even if you're not) is a superbly shiney 14-inch iBook which is frankly enough to give anyone a spontaneous orgasm (who needs enough of their student loan left to be able to buy food when they've got one of those?), and arriving mid-to-late-this week, yeeeeeee!

Yeah, but that won't be to onerous, as they'll all be on my PC at home anyway.

I make all my own clothes

But yes, after a while I realised that it was getting confusing having the clothes named after a lyric from the song I was listening to at the time, and started sensibly calling them by an acronym of the age they were made for followed by a brief description of the item. So, yeah, it'll be easy to delete them.

I haven't got any non-originally-shipped objects apart from Pescado's hacks, which will be fine, apparently. So that's all dandy. It was the files for the uni-mini-neighbourhood that I was vaguely, ignorantly, worried about. But if you think they'll be okay then I'm lazy enough to take your word for it 

Incidentally, these are possibly the cutest emoticons I've even encountered. Most are ugly or moronic (more moronic than the necessary basic degree of moronary that is included, by definition, in an emoticon). But even the usually-hideous Grin () has a sort of serene quality around the corners of its mouth that make it bearable, and the rest are just adorable.

Thank you very much, RabidAngel 

Do you know if the game will just ignore the uni files it doesn't understand, or will they cause problems? Can I just plump the whole EA Games folder - Sims, clothes, neighbourhoods, the lot - onto the Mac, and just jettison the bits that depend on uni (though I'll still have them on my iBook - they'd just be harmlessly ignored)?

And do PC-to-Mac-transferred Sims, neighbourhoods and lots work, as well as clothes?

I've asked the people on the site that ZephyrZodiac kindly linked me to, and they indicated that Sims etc would work fine, and that the game would ignore the uni-files it didn't understand, but it'd be great if you could tell me from experience.

Nah, this happened to me way before uni.

This exact same thing has happened to me: I have never used the ageing off cheat, but these CAS sims on a homemade lot on an unscrewy neighbourhood are inexplicably, irritatingly immortal.

That site doesn't really answer my question, but that's okay. I get the impression that PC-made downloads work fine on Mac versions of TS2, so I imagine the clothes, and possibly even Sims, I transfer to my Mac will work fine. I'll experiment myself.

After about a year slaving over a hot Bodyshop, my sims are able to boast a most excellent wardrobe. I'm getting an iBook for uni (*joyful dancing frenzy*), and would love my new Mac sims can be as beautifully dressed as my current PC ones. Obviously I'll have to leave the clothes based on uni-additions behind, but will I be able to transportalise the bulk of my Projects folder to my new iBook - will the PC clothing files be compatible with Mac ones?

Thanqs.

How, when and why does this happen? What is the maximum capacity of neighbourhoods before they fireball? How many generations can the average neighbourhood (with an average of 2.7 children per couple, say, with a handful or so of illegitimates per generation) sustain before it fireballs? What is the actual cause of the fireball - too many sims? Too many dead sims? What happens when a neighbourhood fireballs? Does it affect other neighbourhoods? The game? Your computer? Etc.

Thanks, I'll download it.

Le gnash!

This is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing. I have had babies with overdue birthdays fester for DAYS before the interaction 'Help With Birthday' is FINALLY carried out. I don't suppose FFS has blasted this little bastard in the bollocks yet? Or does someone know how? I've got a pair of twins at the moment, one of them is an todder teetering on the brink of childhood and one is still a baby and I am VERY FRUSTRATED.

(Wootah to the new home of FFS by the way.)