Before you resort to the drastic (and until someone more Awesome than I takes a look at that error log) check your mouse. Dirty mice tend to do that as well.

I do a lot of thinking about my legacy when it's slow at work, and I decided to go ahead and let Meg pop out all the spawn now, because I can go ahead and use the spawn and grandspawn as great plot fodder. I also wanted to break myself of the habit of ignoring anything and anyone not currently on the Legacy lot, something that plauged Jared Simmons, my first Legacy attempt. When the last two younguns are out of college, I'll put up an heir poll on boolprop or something and go from there. But I'm adamant that I play all the sibs. I look at it not from a time standpoint (it's taken me two months to crank out a chapter; I'm not going for speed here) but from a "what do I want to write" angle. Besides, I'm afraid that if I wait until Gen 8 or 9 to pop out all the younguns, I'll forget about it completely and miss out on the points altogether!
I know, I know, I stated in a previous post that I hate heir polls. I should have been a bit more clear. I hate heir polls written by 12's.

@ Faziah - I wish I'd thought of a beach lot. Yoinked for possible later Legacy ideas.

The Duncan Legacy, which has survived a move to another computer and a complete reinstall (yay for backups, right Purplebunny?) is getting ready to go to Gen 2 at the helm. Meg Duncan, my founder, is the only sim, Legacy or otherwise, that I allowed to have more than four children. She has 12, and her hubby has twin aliens by the only in game abduction I have ever had. I wanted to get the legacy point for the 10 children/30 grandchildren impossible wants, and I wanted to get it out of the way ASAP. I plan to put the spares in houses, marry them off, and have them have a few kids apiece. The extraneous family lines will peter out by generation 4 or 5, as I wanted this Legacy to have a strong "We are Family" theme, to underscore the dirty rotten scoundrel who's trying to ruin everything...
Link to the first chapter is here.
Please be advised that I'm still finding the voice for the Legacy, but I think I've improved greatly over previous attempts.

I'm not sure what's causing the stuck loading screen, but I do know that your sim will get abducted around midnight the day he or she makes the third Secret Society friend.
Could it have anything to do with custom content, I'm wondering? Just for giggles, take the sim that gets stuck and take off all the cc, if any. Who knows, stranger things have made the game work right...

Kyna, I think there's a hack in the DC - dropoldloves? that causes what you're talking about. I too have had the bad memory, but this was a 2LB couple who were fortune and popularity. The popularity got the bad memory. Go figure.

As one of the least awesome people here, I can only offer my personal experience - I got something similiar, but not quite *that* bad - turns out my videocard driver was SERIOUSLY out of date. Try updating your videocard driver first. Hopefully someone More Awesome will pop along and give you some other advice if this doesn't fix it.

I have a green-cover 3 subject notebook. Each family gets three pages. The first page is sim name(s), aspiration(s), LTW, Uni grad (or not), how old (pencilled in), and a week tick mark. I play a week, Monday 8 am to Monday 8 am, give or take, so I can save the lot with no NPCs or visitors on it.
When the family spawns, I jot down what genetics expressed, what I named the tyke(s), and wether or not I bothered to get them trained in the three toddler skills. Children get a note of what other families their friends with, so I know who to invite over on Saturday mornings.
For my legacy house, which has the entire last section to itself, I note down all of the above, plot ideas, who I want them to make friends with (I have a PC vampire/witch husband and wife team who are in the process of stocking up their original supplies to open a witches' store.) and the heir choice system. I HATE the "vote for my legacy heir!11!!1" crap, so it's a simple system. They get a score based on how many Legacy points they earned from the time they were born till the time they graduate Uni and come home. Then I add a bonus based on how high their relationship is with their parents. Whoever has the highest score is the new heir. The second generation has five children, and so far Isaac (named after Isaac Asimov) is in the clear lead, with six points. He gets a bonus of 2 points for having 100/100 Bff with both parents.
This way, I have all the important stuff noted down, and recordkeeping takes me five minutes a game session, if that.

jwaas: The gypsy matchmaker, IIRC, is one of the, ahem, "features carried forward" when you install a later EP. This is by no means a guarantee, but in my game, Gypsy Matchmaker tends to drop a lamp off on my sim's doorstep after at least one out of every two sims in the household has two hobby interests above 8. I also have my sims skill like crazy the first couple of days, via Marcotastics (Thank You JM for that GEM of a hack!!!), and the first two skills I insist on are cooking and cleaning. I wait to stand corrected if anyone more Awesome than I knows anything different, though.

@ Emma: Did that memory just "luckily" not happen thanks to SimPE?   

With damn near every family in my custom hood dropping twins, I second, heartily, that random name suggester. But I keep a baby name book and a phone book handy to find first and last names in a hurry.
I would also like to see the Exchange problem fixed, so I could download some nice families and give them a try. (I am way too unAwesome to know exactly what the problem is, but I do know it is a VBT.)
And is it me, or did the wallpaper and flooring sections sort themselves by custom first, lowest to highest priced, then the rest of the selection, lowest to highest priced in base game? I could have sworn that before Nightlife, I saw this in the catalogs. Now, they're jumbled in any old which-a-ways. Would be nice if that could get fixed.

Funny, I have a 6150 LE and the only problem I've ever experienced was a random game crash after about forty to sixty minutes of playing - that was fixed by a driver upgrade that B suggested. I never got to thank him, because evidently he's been swallowed up in that hellhole known as real life...
I am happily planning my next computer, though, and it will definitely have an ATI Radeon with moar memory.

Any new crafting ability will require two completely illogical skills to be maxed for optimum performance, and will appeal to Sims with personality traits that make skilling up in said skills twice as hard.

Sims will have about as much attraction the the basketball court as they do to a dog that hasn't been washed in six sim days, unless their Lazy/Active attribute is 10, in which case they'll be glued to the court until they are within three sim minutes of expiring from hunger, peeing themselves, or missing the carpool.

Chemistry will be fubared with the addition of the new crafts, at least until JMP fixes it for us.

Pet routing will go belly up, as all pets in a household go and stare at the crafting objects, standing in just such a way as to make Sims routing also go belly up.

@Emma - was that in the base game? The Prima Guide (and no, I don't take what they say as gospel, but there are some correct things in there) stated that wants would be refreshed "if they haven't been checed in a while". I remember when I first got the game, they seemed to refresh a lot. So maybe "a while" = an hour?

Now they refresh about every six game hours, or when the Sim wakes up, but that's all I remember.

On a related note, has anyone had their locked want slots roll when the rest of them refresh? I'm talking about normal everyday refreshes, like waking up, when a want is fulfilled, etc. They usually roll back to what they were showing in the first place, and the lock appears magically back in place, but a few times it hasn't and the want disapears, unfulfilled. It was only a big thing in my Legacy house, where fearless leader Matt came thisclose to going from 1st red aspiration all the way to platinum when his son was born, but when he woke up to go watch said son's birth, the want slot, which I know I locked, rolled and became "Eat cereal". A 8000 pt traded in for a measly 500 pt. Grrr.

Thanks for the sites and advice, and a quick apology for not getting back to you sooner. I went away for the weekend to indulge in my other hobby - D&D. I'll test out your suggestions and see what happens.

I started getting this message, downloaded a new driver for my video card, and I still get this stop error.

I have an AMD Athlon 64, NVidia GeForce 6150 LE (256 MB memory), 1 GB ram, Windows XP Pro.

It happens when I have a Sim selected, tap "spacebar" to go to another Sim, on a lot with at least four Sims, with a meduim-sized house or larger. I pruned out the high CC, enormous lots, so I don't think that's an issue. I have no hacks, and very little custom content - mostly the Maxis stuff by MaxiodMonkey. I have all the EP's and SP's except Holiday SP.

It also happens if there's weather, a lot of Sims moving around, and I'm issuing commands or flipping between Sims. And I've tried going so slow my Legacy tenth gen will be born before his first gen ancestor gets a shower, potty break, and out the door to go to work. (Slight, slight exaggeration, but only slight. I'm a teensy bit frustrated.)

Sometimes it will happen on the teensiest lot, but only if there's a party with a metric shitton of Sims over.

Does anyone have any advice/workarounds/sympathy?
Mucho thanks.

The only way to have a decent garden without hitting maxmotives about once every five game seconds is to have no more than two of each tree and two plots for every item your gardening Sim can plant. And compost anything and everything that can't get up and walk away under its own steam. Trust me on this one - I've been playing the game for about a month now with all the EP's, and I played TS2 when it and Uni were out for over a year. (I love my new computer!)

Cora Blood was clearly a "I have no idea how Cameraman mode works, but this is soooo artistic!"
I was actually liking the first one until I saw the two guys. Then I closed it.
I am now far too scared to do a search of my own...
And the sad, sad fact of it all...
People who can write and do decent stories get buried under metric SHITtons of this stuff.
One simmer I know closed up shop and stopped posting because shit like this was getting 5 stars, and her decent, rather original Legacy story got a maximum of 2.35 stars.
I know why - can we say "massive circle jerk"? I'll bet you 50 Simoleans that most of these kids know each other IRL or through MySpace, and of course, everybody rates everybody else's 5 stars.
Gag me with a reticluated spline.