Yesterday I played two households for about half an hour each, and it didn't go away.

I removed the graphics drivers and reinstalled them just now, and the slow-motion is gone.  I guess I'll just have to reinstall them every time I play from now on, which is obnoxious, but at least it's something.

Believe me, I will take any kind of question right now.  Thank you!

My virus scanner isn't running and I don't have anything else actively open.  Occasionally I'll have Firefox open, but I've been doing that on and off for a long time, not just as recently as this problem.  I'm not sure what else would be running, but I'll check into it.

If anybody is still reading this: the slow motion started again, and I'm definitely out of ideas this time.  Deleted the cache files, removed Downloads folder, tried the cheat, etc.  Nothing helped.  This time, though, the clock has also turned to slow motion (I'm pretty sure it was unaffected last time, but maybe it was and I just didn't notice?)

After comparing the clock time, I'm estimating that the game is running at about a third of its normal speed.  Each Sim second takes three real-life seconds to pass.  This is progressively more annoying, and *any* help would be very much appreciated!

Funnily enough, the clock was just fine. 

I loaded up my game today and proceeded to spend a lot of time redecorating the Goths' house in Pleasantview, so the game was on pause for awhile.  When I left their house to go play the Dreamers, without having played the Goths at all, I started playing and noticed that the Sims seemed to be moving in slow motion... not as in, lag; they were walking in perfectly smooth slow motion.

I checked snootysims to see if there was a cheat that I had somehow activated.  I tried slowmotion 0 and the slow motion continued.  I tried slowmotion 8, the slowest speed, and the Sims were barely moving.  Back to 0 and they were in the original state of slow motion.

I switched to a different household and the same thing was happening.

I closed out of the game and re-loaded.  This time, the slow-pan camera that goes when you enter the neighborhood was noticeably slower than usual.  I can't remember if it did that when I loaded the game to play the Goths or not.

I closed the game, deleted the cache files in the My Documents > EA Games folder.  Re-loaded, still slow motion.

I don't have any hacks/mods in my game.  My custom content is limited to bonus downloads from buying packs at certain stores.  I'm not sure if a download can cause spontaneous slow motion, but I took out the Download folder and launched the game again, just in case.  No change; still in slow motion.

My computer has never given me any problems like this before.  The graphics in the game are still pristine and there's no lag... just the slow motion.  I have all the expansion and stuff packs installed, minus Happy Holiday, and my game is fully patched.  In the four years I've been Simming, I can count the number of times my game has crashed on one hand.

As you can imagine, this is rather annoying.  I'm downloading an update for my graphics driver right now in case that has something to do with it, but beyond that, I have no idea what to do.  Any help would be seriously appreciated!


EDIT: The updated driver somehow fixed it!  I'm still curious, though -- does anyone know what might have caused it?  The driver hadn't been updated in months before this, so is it normal that it would cause something like the slow motion to randomly happen?

...does that title make sense?  Anyway:

When I first got the game, I made a bunch of random CAS Sims and families and eventually stopped playing them.  This was before I knew that deleting them from the Sim Bin was a Very Bad Thing, so that's what I did.  After a bit of poking around in SimPE, I noticed that all of their character files are still listed with the unlinked Sims.

Do I need to delete them from SimPE somehow to avoid my game going boom?  The only SimPE-related methods that I've found of getting rid of Sims involves using Theo's deleter tool in-game... and since they've already been deleted in-game, I don't know if there's anything else I need to do with them, or if I should just leave the files alone.