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.jpg3) 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?