6.14.00010.7772 build june 2005. I got the problem when I updated with the next version, build sometime 2006. I get a few minor graphical glitches (sometimes the neighbourhood screen darkens when I rotate the view, but only for a few seconds), but otherwise it works fine, I get all the effects, water reflections, fish etc..

I have a Geforce 6600 GT.

That is the question, what is the nVidia BSOD problem? The way Maxis/EA defined it, it had nothing to do with the nVidia problem as I understand it (goes repeatedly into loading loops with sandclock and blue - or in my case purple - screen, graphics loose definition until it crashes) and it did not surprise me that they were unable to replicate the problem since they were looking for something that did not exist.
And Norton is not the problem, because - undoubtedly like many others - I never had Norton installed. Like many others - at least 20 in a German forum posting on this topic (everyone who tried it) - I could solve the problem by switching back to an "outdated" driver. Unfortunately this is not a solution for anyone with a brandnew nVidia card because the latest series don't work with this driver.
Did I report my finding on the BBS? Did I tell EA tech support? - Yes. What is the first message you get from tech support? - Update your drivers.  It's pathetic.
Now if I have a driver that works and then the next version doesn't my logical conclusion would be to compare the two, look at the changes and try to narrow down the problem. It's not the way EA/Maxis approached this though. I do not expect them to ever find the answer, so I am sticking to my old driver and my old card (which is pretty good anyway and can handle the game without problems) and have the problem solved for myself.

A small workaround for people who can not be bothered to change all their files manually and do not want to buy bookcases only to study parenting:

The option is not available when choosing a book from the bookcase, but if a sloppy sim leaves it on the floor there is the option to study parenting by clicking on the book.

They don't get the benefit/LTA points independent of the lifetime meter score. Based on the information from the Prima Guide which Tigerlilley gave (which has some errors, but the hourly rates seem to be correct), a toddler on constant platinum could get a maximum of approx. 7700 points from it. As a baby (no best friend required) they get an initial bonus of 1800 points. So it works like that:

1800 points as a baby + 600 from the first skill learned = 2400. For a lifetime meter score of more than 2000 they get 2 benefit points.
Learning the other two skills will add 1200 points to that score, which means that it brings it up to 3600 points if they don't gain anything for their mood and means they don't get another LTA point because they need a lifetime meter score of 4000 for that. One child in my game which grew into a toddler last night and was trained on all skills and on constant platinum after learning the first skill, has reached a score of 5000 on its first day in that lifestage (ca. 20 hours) and has 3 points.
Toddlers close to grow up and with all skills when Freetime is installed are actually getting the worst deal because they don't start with any points, not even the bonus for birth. Generally the period from birth to reaching school age seems to give you a massive lifetime meter increase.
Children on constant platinum could add another 6700 points, so its not enough to completely fill the lifetime meter. As teenagers they could get 8700 points maximum, adults 13400.

From 6000 points, which give you 4 LTA points every increase of 3000 adds one LTA point, so you get 5 for a score of over 9000. If the sim has a miserable life and has always been on the edge of aspiration failure not even the first woohoo can save him since it doesn't bring him up to the necessary 12000 points.
The hourly addition of points apparently carries on during holidays and on community lots, which could make leaving the house a big lifetime meter booster, especially if a sim heads from one dream date to the next.

What I haven't completely worked out are the milestones. Learning the nursery rhyme definitely does not give extra points, but you don't seem to get anything for the best friend either (which usually happens when they are babies and they all have the same initial 1800 points), so I tend to believe that the information from the Prima Guide is correct there and you get the points for the first love.

The children were I forgot the firstborn effect are clones. They don't only share the same personality they look identical too. Plus while it is hard to tell with regard to the facial features, when I reroll at birth (and sometimes I want to get a particular outcome) and have sims with equally dominant custom skins and eyes, the sequence is always the same, first custom skin A with Eyes B, second.... The only thing that can change when I quit (the game) and restart the sequence is the gender.

The new objects seem to work with the nudist hack in (I tried with the bycycle), some activities (swimming) give you fitness enthusiasm, but the original exercise machines, tai-chi and yoga don't.

Sometimes I think it is just me, but my sims don't always seem comply with their programming. I always had some couples where the attraction did not follow the rule. Actually I like them better because of it.

My favourite one has the combination aries/libra (aries are repulsed by libras),fortune/popularity. Their turn-ons match as do their personalities, but they should not have more than two bolts. They don't care and have three bolts. Sometimes I also get the impression that sims develop a stronger chemistry in a longterm relationship.
Another observation I made with Stella Terrano - who must have some special alien pheromones and is generally fancied by every male she come across - is that attraction can differ even when the "target" is identical. One of the NPC's sharing a dormer with Stella has three bolts for her (and a very high attraction score, checked via ACR), one of the students from the Maxis premade "Shifting Paradymes" has exactly the same personality, the same starsign and the same match with regard to turn-ons - he has one bolt for her.

Either it is not working right in my game or it functions differently than it is described. Anyway, one of my sims trained a toddler with Freetime installed and the toddler got two LTA points, apparently for learning to walk and for the potty training.
Now I just had a student having his first woohoo but he got no LTA point for that. Generally the students got 4 points, but I noticed that some that had a gold or platinum aspiration level already have 5 points and he was one of them. The same is true for some of my teenagers and one child, they got an extra point, apparently because of their aspiration level.
So it seems that instead of getting a point for a milestone, the milestone tends to push the meter above a certain limit. Looking at some of the scores, more than 9000 points equal five LTA points, but to get to six the sim needs a score higher than 13000 (?, I was judging from the only elder, Mortimer), which would explain why the student did not get a LTA point.
Thinking about it, it would make more sense that way. Take a romance sim with a fear to get married, force him or her through it (and into aspiration failure) it should theoretically be possible to balance out the milestone effect, which would be more plausible than to award a LTA point to a sim with a nervous breakdown.

I don't see the connection between the randomizer and twins, because as far as I know the sequence determines appearance and personality, but has no connection to the number of children born. Or am I wrong?

Because every time they use a computer it is either occupied by another sim or another sim stands next to them and complains because they use it.

I agree that sims are a bit too fond of diary writing since Freetime and choose the most unsuitable situations (shop owner in a shop full of customers) for it, but I would like to point out that diary writing is not only for 12 year olds.
When my grandmother died I took charge of her diaries which she started writing again in 1964, one year after my birth. I loved reading them and they told me a lot about my family and my grandmother. A few years later I got prepared to move and so was my brother, there was a mix-up of boxes and one of mine was accidently driven to a waste plant and burned, including all the diaries up to 1971 (and they were the ones with the most interesting stuff). I still consider this as one of my greatest material losses.
Diaries written by famous or completely unknown people are found and published, because they provide not only a very particular perspective on the time when they were written, but also tell about the person who has written them.

EDIT: Oh, and I think if it gets too much I get the hack from Dizzy, it sound like the right one for me.

Not exactly a bug, but something they "fixed" in the new ep much to my annoyance:

When picking a career reward, you could undo the action in the reward panel and then redo it in buy mode, which resulted in the career reward still being available. It's cheating obviously since I could provide all the children in the family with the rewards and they could take them to college. But I do not see the point of removing something nobody ever complained about.

Either the nudist hack or hula and more (I think its the former) interferes with fitness enthusiasm, which means that some activities like working out on the exercise machines, yoga and tai-chi do not expose the natural talent or give hobby points.

I used the updated version for BV and would be happy if somebody updated it for Freetime because I have some dedicated sim nudists and I feel like I have taken something away from them.

I could not find a post which states that. However, since the OFB cheesecake it is possible to change it from a single birth to twins after conception. What is not possible - without hacks, cheating etc. - is to change it from twins to a single birth. So generally the number of babies is determined at conception, just as the gender is determined at birth. If you use any form of pregnancy scanner you find out the number of children instantly after the first hour. 

I quite like the idea. Has anybody tried to confirm this?

It definitely sounds like the problem you get when you install newer NVidia drivers. I had this until I changed back to the old driver.

Clothes that are based on the nude mesh work for pregnancies, as well as those based on the short summer dress plus a number of custom meshes.

That was the motive resets I meant, I got them before installing most of the hacks. I have no idea where they come from, at the moment I try not to save at 2 o'clock at night in case they are all wide awake when I return.

If the clothes mesh does not include a pregnancy state it does not show, but it has always been like that. What do you mean by "reset", the pregnancy or the sim? I get motive resets whenever I start the game and enter a family home, but I had them before I put this back in. I would like to know why it was meant not to be compatible with BonVoyage.

Which of TwoJeffs' hacks are you referring to? I do not find anything that relates to maternity clothes.

"Active, goal-orientated" sound so much better than "acted upon, responsive", doesn't it? And yet, I ask myself, unless you are following rigidly (which would be, well.. rigid), if you discover in the fourth year that you headed in the wrong direction what advantage do you have over someone without a plan? 
I love it how life has been throwing things at me as they were needed. Plus all the decisions which probably appeared unreasonable at the time and worked in my favour in the end. It substantially increased my optimism about life and myself. On the other hand my goal might just be as vague as "cultivate my character and discover and learn as much about the world as possible". Hard to tell. Could also be "guarantee financial security so I don't have to beg with the social services when I'm old."

Not necessarily. I recently learned that in East Germany they used to have "Plansilvester", which was the day when the quota from the plan was achieved and workers began to work towards a bonus payment. While it might have been possible to reach it by November, it was risky because it could lead to the quota being raised for the next year. On the other hand if you did too late you got less bonus payment. Therefore they organised their work so that the quota would be achieved around christmas. I could imagine that workers in Soviet Russia made similar provisions.

Back to the sims lifetime meter:
Keeping the aspiration up increases it, but it does not seem to be directly connected to the wishes. I sent Mary-Sue and Daniel Pleasant on a holiday and while he (on perma-plat) got a message saying that it was a fantastic week, Mary-Sue (mixed green-gold) got one saying it was a good. She had more holiday-related wants and fulfilled more than he did. His life time meter is filled up one notch more than hers now.

I understand that once it is maxed out you get all the benefits, but otherwise it sounds like the benefit points are awarded only for the milestones and not for reaching a certain level on the lifetime meter. It will take some playing to find out.

Thanks, I never tried. It was reported as conflicting with BV and so I kept it out.

Oh, and I put OFB_showerbath back in and did not notice any problems so far.
Or rather, I do have one bug, which could be related to a hack - not necessarily this one - which is that on loading the game and the family I played the night before their motives reset as if I had just installed.

I would like to add pregnancywearanyoutfit by Squinge, which was never updated for BV. I miss that one.

I got a description for it, either in the wants panel or in the memories and it says that there are also some special interactions which only BFF get, something along the lines of sharing secrets, though it is worded differently.

It still doesn't make sense that they get benefit points for something they never wanted. With regard to the new lifetime bar all sims are the same.

Indivduality and variety kinda go out the window when you start thinking strategically about real life, too. Reality can be gamed just like any other game.[/quote]

Do people ever do think strategically about real life? It reminds me of a conversation I had with a lawyer I work for, who had to fill in a form about a secondment, which included the question which goals he had set forth for himself and hoped to achieve with it. I never met anybody who sits at home in the evening drawing a little chart with a three-month-plan, formulating specific goals. If I did I would probably consider this person slightly disturbed but it would definitely be a highly individual approach.

The ADHD effect can be countered by using Macro Concentrate in combination with noadhd. As soon as I get to actually TRYING most of those things, I'll start developing bigger, better, anti-ADHD systems.
[/quote]
It might not work as planned (and can be annoying) but I believe that it is intentional that the hobby activities are not continued for any length of time. It could be meant to encourage the player to bring the sims to a level where they go into the zone. When they max out their enthusiasm for a hobby "they are so passionate about it that they forget everything around them". In that state there is a slower motive decay, but the main feature seems to be that they continue an activity without stopping.

I agree. They missed the opportunity for more individuality/variety, the more so when you start to think strategically about the benefit points. For example:
The couple I played is a combination of knowledge (her) and family (him). Both these aspirations require that you choose a benefit "slower comfort/fun decay" to get to the other benefits, which is bad for a start since with a filled up a fun bar many of the hobby actions are stopped instantly. The same when you choose the benefits from the motives panel, where you have to use 4 benefit points to reach the slower energy decay.

Therefore, instead of choosing a secondary aspiration, which you consider suitable for them or which would make them more compatible, it makes more sense to pick a secondary aspiration like romance or popularity, because you get slower energy/hygiene decay with only two benefit points.  I sent them to town for a few hours to check how many new neighbours came with this EP, and the wife, Mary, had a massive energy/hygiene drop (it is winter), so this benefit would be very useful for her.
I have another couple and it was mainly for them that I wished for a secondary aspiration. They are very special to me and I do not want to tamper with them too much, though I wish they had a better chemistry (she is popularity/he is family). So the idea was - especially since they have four children together - to give her a secondary family aspiration. Now family does not have any great benefits (more twins?!! No, thanks I get enough of them) and when I checked, the chemistry between them had not changed (I did not save). On the other hand if I choose romance (an aspiration which does not go well with family) and the first benefit from it, she would get a higher chemistry with her family orientated husband I guess.
As far as the wants are concerned: I did not get any hobby related wants, but if they would get wants related to the secondary aspiration I would not notice a difference. I can't understand why they try to sell it as a new feature. My sims never ever only got wants related to their aspiration, actually with some its the opposite. Family sims (especially female) who never get the wish to get engaged or marry, knowledge sims who get a lot of woohoo wants, fortune sims who are really into skill building etc. etc.