More Awesome Than You!

Longer version: I got several EPs and SPs for Christmas.  I've been playing new hoods with no problems. 

A couple days ago, I started playing an old legacy hood, where I was using lot sync timers to keep the houses at roughly the same "day."

I played one house for several hours, saved several times, and quit.  Next day, the game started and let me choose a neighborhood.  When I chose the same house, the lot crashed on load.  Figured it was the family, so I evicted and tried moving them into another house.  Crashed while loading the lot without moving the family into the house.  Tried moving them back into their original house, crashed while loading the lot.  Tried another house; that house also crashed on load.  Tried making a new family; crashed while loading the "family view."  Tried a house in another 'hood, crashed on load.

Finally fixed it by renaming the My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 folder, letting the game make a new folder, testing every theory of why the crash happened (with no luck), then moving the Neighborhoods and various custom content to the new folder. 

Everything was fine, except I lost the lot sync timer info.  Is there a way to find out what day the families were on, so I can hand-set their timers again?

Sounds like something that happened in one of my hoods.  All I did was make sure that all houses were saved on the same day in the same season (i.e. Winter day 1), and then reprogrammed the lot sync timers to "Day 10".  I figured, as long as they all read the same day, it doesn't much matter what day number it is.  If you remember roughly what day your sims are on, you could just program the timers for that day.  You'd have to do that for each house.

Perhaps someone has a better way.

That's the fundamental problem.... I haven't played this hood since last fall, so I don't remember what day any of them were on, and they were spread across a 10 day (or so) span.  There's only about 10 houses, so resetting the timers isn't an onerous job.  I just need to recover the info saying the Todd family was on day X, the Mills family was on day Y, etc.

I suggest you reload the backup from before you ripped out ALL of your downloads and MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE THAT ONE IN. For obvious reasons, removing the Lot Sync Timer from your downloads results in the permanent loss of all data records, so DON'T DO IT. You can remove all the other worthless cosmetic crap, but never remove a functional element, or you could make the crashing worse or lose data.

Actually, my testing was in a new hood which had never been Sync Timer'ed.  Never ran the existing hood without the Downloads folder as far as I know.

Well, I get to guess what the old settings were as best I can...

If you even loaded the game with that hood in and the downloads folder out, it will be corrupted by doing so. Never remove downloads that use inventory tokens to track things unless you REALLY want to lose all that data.

Well, that certainly explains a few things about how my lot sync got borked a month or so ago.

Ah!  Is moving the N00x folder out enough, or should I make a backup copy of the NeighborhoodManager.package as well?

NeighborhoodManager is useless, so don't worry about it. I'm not sure it actually DOES anything other than occasionally get corrupt and bork the game.

Am I allowed to delete it or will that cause unrecoverable problems?

I'm thinking I'll zip it up, so next time my game starts crashing on every lot, I can just replace it with a "good" copy.

Don't worry about zipping it; a fresh new copy will be recreated automatically every time you delete it.

Coolness!  Another file I can tell people to delete when they say "My game crashes!"