I had the "spontaneous combustion" bug, which was fixed by the first patch. Basically what happened was that a sim would die in a cooking-related accident, but for some reason wouldn't appear as dead. So you could go on playing as normal, unknowing that actually the game thought he was dead. Then, a few sim hours or days later, the sim would "have a fit" (literally - it looked like some kind of seizure) and die, with no warning.

I was significantly traumatised by this to be unable to sleep, and my dear partner ended up staying awake until 5am downloading the patch (28.8k dialup - fast, at the time) to fix the bug, and SimEdit to fix the token that made the game think Jim was dead.

You downloaded the Lot Debugger? It's a buyable item, in Misc/Misc. You place it somewhere on your lot, then click it, and "Nuke kicky bags" should be an option if your prob is stuck kicky bags.

I hate that bug! Hate hate hate it! I've redesigned one of the dorms in my Strangetown uni and I want to copy that dorm to my Pleasantview uni. However, I'm not sure how to "clean" the dorm to make it safe to copy. I've found that moving playable sims out of the dorm isn't enough to "clean" it for a new family - the Myne doors are left with the old playable sims' claims on them, so new ones can't claim them until I boolprop enable Build Mode to replace the doors. Plus, playing sims that live in a dorm gets expensive when chairs and beds are randomly left with the ghostly imprints of sims there - I find myself deleting "stuck" objects with move_objects on every sim day.

So, bearing in mind that it's a bad idea to copy houses that are packaged with a family to a new neighbourhood, I haven't dared try to copy the dorm file across to my other uni, because there's obviously something stopping them from "cleaning" out old sim information. I'm wondering if J.M. or anyone else has some advice. Could I, f'instance, boolprop force the lot to Community to "clean" it, then boolprop it back to Dorm? (sounds potentially hazardous)

The biggest compliment I can pay to this hack is that I don't  notice it's there. Now my sims do what I'd expect them to, and don't constantly annoy me by doing something weird. Nice work .

If the problem is that the sims are being seen as visitors, have you tried the Community Lot Skilling hack? It's comm-skilling.package:

Controlled sims, NPCs, and townies may gain skills while visiting community
lots, including non-college community lots. Notifications of skill-point gain
will only be displayed for controllable sims.

I think this is the package that allows visitors to gain skills in other people's homes as well. I know I frequently see a llama mascot guy sitting down with one of my controlled sims watching the Yummy Channel with a bar above his head!