Thank you so much!  I will try this when I go to his house tomorrow and see if it works, and either way will post here to let you know what happened.

I did several searches, found other posts with information on what to do and followed it all.  Let me explain what is happening.
I upgraded my boyfriend's game, to WA and HELS, and he had been playing in Riverview.  When he went to play, he found no schools, and several other rabbitholes gone.  He called me to fix this.  I looked it up here, and followed the reccomendations (spelled wrong?) of moving the Riverview.world file, re-downloading it, and even downloaded it from the Sims 3 site extracted it and recompressed it, and put it in again.  Still, no schools or other buildings.  I started a new Riverview game, checked it out, same thing.  When I tried to put them in manually, the files were not even there.  I have tried everything I could to get this to work.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Oh, and I used s3pe to put the files extracted with Delphy's tool together, and it still did not work.  The stupid launcher is not working (of course).

Edit:  I went in, moved his family out to the bin, deleted the town, deleted the Cache files, downloaded it yet again! and then I re-installed it again, started up the game and looked, same problem.  I'm stumped!

I just wanted to say, this tool is a wonder to me!  I drop files that are 25k bytes in it and they drop to 5k!  It has saved me so much disc space on my computer I am loving it, and everything works like a charm.  Now when I download a sims3pack, I first drop it in this tool, extract it using Delphy's tool, then use s3pe to merge it with other files, then drop it in this one again.  It recompresses it even more then!  And everything is showing up in my game for me.  All I can say is, Bless Pescado and all those here that are making playing Sims 3 much more doable and enjoyable.

Thank you.  Since the Windle buildings are refusing to load using the launcher, I will try that.

I did a search and did not find the answer to this.  I just downloaded the great castles and medieval lots Windle by Simverses, but have been avoiding using the launcher to add items I downloaded.  How do I add the lots without using the launcher?  Where do I put the files?  Can I extract them and s3pe them like I do items?  Am I going to have to use that stinking launcher for these?

I cannot get my launcher to launch!  When I click on it to start it, it just crashes and wonderful Vista just checks to see if there's a solution (waste of time that).  Is there a solution to that?
My internet went down last night, so I decided to play the Sims 3, but once I got to the world I got a pop up that said Awesome Mod was out dated and it closed the game for me.  I can't find that frigging program (I recall installing it) to remove it either.  It's more annoying than helpful!
When I finally got internet today, I discovered the CaW, after I updated Awesome of course, and so I downloaded that and tried to run it.  I was told I had to patch, so I ran the launcher and patched, then the launcher crashed.  I did not think anything of it at the time, was trying to run CaW.  I spent a frustrated couple hour trying to figure out the Create a World, guess I am too stupid to use it.
Then I came here to see what was being said about it.  I read this post and after seeing what was happening here, I recalled my crash and decided to try it again.  It crashed again.  I changed my resources.cfg file as instructed and moved the files.  Tried it again, crash.  What did I miss?

I actually like that road, Lion.  If you can manage to make a world with that I would definately download it.  After trying for a frustrated two hours to figure out that CAW tool, I have realized it's not something I can do.  It's more complicated than my pea brain can understand (perhaps later after I have read more I will try again).
I will definately be on the look out for worlds people have created though!

Thank you!  For some reason my search did not find this.   

With all my concern about the blue lot, I forgot my main concern, that the lifetime happiness cheat code will not work.  It still does not work, even with no mods in it.  Anyone have any ideas why and what i can do about it?

I have three hoods that I was running, and am more than willing to get rid of two of them, but put a lot of work in the house and two sims I just made.  How do I get rid of an old hood?  Is there a in-game delete button?  Or do i have to do that manually somehow?  This is still new to me as I have not played Sims 3 nearly as much as I have played Sims 2.

Edit: I fired up the game and deleted two of my three hoods.  It was easier than I thought.  I feel kinda stupid for the prior questions.  Now, to go find the links to explain how to do the rest.  I will test to see if the cheat is still not working once I have done that.

Edit again:  I went back in the game, after I deleted the other two hoods, and now my one hood left is full of big blue squares instead of lots with sims floating in them.  I seem to recall reading of others having this trouble, so will do a search on it.

Edit the Third:  I had Lemoncandy's plants in my packages folder, gonna run the game again and see if that was the trouble.

Edit the fourth:  I removed lemoncandy's files, replaced them with the new ones, removed all my cache files (that I could find), ran the game, same thing, blue lots.  Took out all custom content from my mods folder, ran the game, same thing.  Removed my mods folder completely, same thing, and now I am stuck with what to do.  How do I check the items that were downloaded via the launcher?  Could it be something I got from (I know, horrors) TSR?  If so, how do i check that?

Edit the fifth:  I just deleted the hood that was full of blue lots and started a new one.  I hated to do that but just could not think of anything else to try.  So far the new one is ok, but if it borks up too, I will post here about that.  I put all my mods and CC back in, and all seems ok so far.  Still no lifetime happiness cheat however.

After re-reading my post and your reply, it occurred to me that I was not very clear on what I had posted.  The only hacks I have in there now are Awesome Mod, the MTS breast and body sliders by Jonha, and the pointed ears sliders.  All the rest I took out and will add no more till I get WA.  I found the food one updated for WA but not sure if it will work in my game as I have it now.
If, after taking out my hacks, I still have the trouble, it might be a custom content item, and that will be a pain to check as I have a LOT of custom content.  I love new hair and clothing and patterns.

I have not gotten WA yet (hope to get it for Christmas) but have had all the updates so far.  I took out all my hacks except for the sliders, super speedy books, and the newest Awesome Mod, and I left in Cooking and ingredients Overhaul too, not realizing it needed to be updated too.  I have taken care of that one already.
I had the following problems with my game while i was running it.
1) the only items available in the grocery store were the fish (most likely Cooking Overhaul)
2) no cook books in the book store were available (not sure if it was the cooking Overhaul, but gonna test that theory.  It might be the books one.  Took that one out too.)
3) tried to use the cheat code lifetimehappiness and it did not recognize that as a valid code.

I have searched as best i can here to see if there is any mention of that happening and found nothing.  If I missed something please be kind enough to point out where I missed it.

If this is a new problem, any suggestions as to what I can do to test it and fix it?

Thank you

I couldn't get that UPX program to work for me, but I did all the rest and my laptop appreciates it.  Since I have all the expansions and all the stuff packs, what little room I can save counts.  I even cut down on what CC I downloaded to save space, imagine that!
Anywhoo, thanks for posting this.  it helped.

Thank you, I found a program on my computer that was using that combo to open it, so I changed it to something else and am booting up my game to test it.  I think that link worked, even though it was not the first thing they suggested.  I was really not looking forward to taking out my downloads and testing each one to see if it worked.

I searched for an answer here but was not able to find it.  I have all the Eps and all the Sps and several hacks and downloads.  The last two times I played I was not able to open the cheats window.  I tried Shift + CNTL+ C in all sorts of ways but got nothing.  Since I like to play with testingcheatsenabled true, I have not been able to do so.  I can't even move objects.  Could this be something caused by my hacks?  I have the hack conflict download and it does not show any conflicts.  I got most of my hacks here and from Paladin.  Are there any known issues with any of them?  Please advise.

I have come out of semi-permanent Lurkerdom just to say thanks for all your hard work on these and to ask, are the updated files all on the first page?  I just read through the entire 17 pages of thread to find the most recent ones and the fixed ones, but I dled from page 1.