coconnor's information worked for me too, although my game is still randomly being killed by something (it crashes to desktop with no warning).  

The MTS2 link advising how to stop Windows from causing it doesn't seem to have fixed the problem, although I find it very easy to believe that Windows is behind this one rather than the game itself, simply from the fact that it falls over completely cleanly - one second it's running, the next I'm looking at my desktop and the entire Sims3 process has gone bye-bye.

So at least I can get the game to load again: now I just can't keep it running. I've tried creating new neighbourhoods and new Sims in case something's corrupted, but it's still borked.  My only hack is Awesomemod, and no cc anymore aside from a half-dozen custom hairs that I'm going to take out before trying again.  I really didn't want to do that, since they're very pretty, but as Blackadder says, "(you do what you) must when the devil vomits into your kettle".

I'm getting Windows 7 shortly; if removing the hairs and starting a new neighbourhood doesn't work, I might just give the whole thing a miss until then since it'll require re-installation at that point.

I am actually going to quote from an older post about this topic:

Check your installation of the "framework."  If you downloaded AwesomeMod from the beta link in the very first post in this thread, there should also be a RAR file in your download which contains the framework. You will unzip that file and install the (still empty) files in both places (that is to the base game root installation directory and also to the World Adventures root installation directory (this is most likely C:\Program Files, or in the case of a 64-bit operating system it would be C:\Program Files (x86)). 

Also within that RAR file will be a file called d3dx9_31.dll.  You will need to copy that into the Game>Bin folders of BOTH directories. 

There is also a file called Resource.cfg.  If I am correct, that file needs to be placed into whichever root directory you have installed AwesomeMod.

As far as the actual placement of AwesomeMod, I would suggest you begin by installing into the base game installation directory - Mods>Packages; if that does not work, then try installing it to World Adventures>Mods>Packages.  Remember to move the Resource.cfg with AwesomeMod. 

I don't know why, but I have had to install AwesomeMod and any other mods to the WA subdirectory to get them to work.  Also, remember you cannot have two core mods - so you cannot use AwesomeMod and that Gabriel mod that was mentioned together.