As far as I know the game considers them children.

Could only afford 20 USD since BPS has a donation drive going as well, need to donate there to.

Fuck me dead, I have no idea what that means but that's due to the fact that English isn't my native tongue.
I wonder how many grammatical errors I made in that sentence.

I don't have WA and I don't intend getting it either, I didn't patch my game and it runs fine.
Never patched any of my Sims 2 or Sims 1 games and never had a problem. I got all the EP's for all of them, but this time around I'm only getting one, if it ever comes out... and that is weather.

They made the towns look so realistic and don't include weather in the base game, how realistic is that!
Did I say realistic, I take some of it back. Cars drive through each other for crying out loud!

I hate looking at sunshine day in and day out...I want rain and snow and everything what goes with it.
Grabbing an umbrella before you go outside, puddles and mud, snowdrifts and so on.
I can dream!

Yes it's good that you're trying to work out the problem, but I never had the errors or my game crashing. Touch wood!
But then I'm only into my second generation, as I like to swap households.

I only have 2 mods in my game and some of the EA store furniture ( what I DL from PMBD), but no CC hair, patterns, furniture, sims or houses and certainly nothing from TSR!

My game isn't patched ...I never patched any of my Sims 1 or 2 games either and never had a problem.

I'm also not connected to the internet on that PC, because of this I don't have a store version installed...but a torrent one.

I'm running XP Home Edition on a Pentium 4, 3.5 GHZ with 2 GB of Ram and a Nvidia 7300 graphics card and I never had a problem with the game.

I hope you guys find a solution!

You're save to use the Launcher as long as you're not on the internet, I do it all the time.
But once you're connected to the net, it want's to connect to it and who knows what it does then.