I have definitely seen Sims draw back and wave their hands in front of their noses when encountering a smelly Sim. 

Then you aren't paying very close attention, since Sims encountering a smelly Sim will wave their hands in disgust, and get a disgusted moodlet, while the offending Sim will get a low hygiene moodlet.

It's not much worth stocking the fridge, in my opinion.  They'll cook with ingredients in their inventory, and unless they roll a wish for a perfect dish, I can't see any practical difference between a normal quality meal and a perfect one.  They both seem to offer the same level of (over)satisfaction.

Really?  Delurking to revive an argument that's been dead for over a week?  After you saw that she'd been canned, that seems like a good time to delete everything pertaining to it since you could clearly see it was no longer relevant. 

By the way, it really helps if you only quote the relevant parts of the post rather than the entire thing.

You can just sell the fridge and buy a new one.  The fridge isn't really a container, it's just an access point to the household's fridge container.  If you add a new fridge while keeping your old, you'll see that everything listed in one fridge is also available in another.  Removing from one = removing from the other.  So sell the fridge, buy a new one, and save yourself the effort of trying to transfer stuff.

Either way, if you have the traits panel open when they age up (whichever method they're aging up through), it causes an error with the new trait being discarded.

It works the same way - Enter "Edit Hood" and on the left there is a button with an icon of 2 houses.  Click that button (hovering over it tells you it is "Switch Active Household") and then select the new house you want to play from the hood.  

Unless you install AwesomeMod (I'll let you find that on your own, since if you can't find it, you should probably avoid trying to install it anyway), you should be aware that doing so results in the family that you are leaving losing all of their inventory and current locked wishes, and they will be free to do whatever the hell the game decides to have them do - you are leaving them to the mercies of Story ReProgression, regardless of whether you have it enabled in the options or not.

I wish people would stop saying this.  It is absolutely possible to play a family, then decide to create a new family, and have them exist in the same neighborhood as your first family.  Just go into Edit Town and go into CAS from there.  Get out of CAS, place them in a house, and they are in your current, active neighborhood.  You can then decide to switch to them as your active household, or go back to the first family.  Either way, both are now in the same universe.

Multiple saves files are meant only for creating multiple copies of the neighborhood. Don't want parallel universes?  Don't create more than one save.   

I've always been a perfection player, never able to get into the play style of deliberately making my Sims miserable. 

Anyway, my feeling about this topic is to not fix what I never considered broke.  Motive bars have been there from the beginning and I like them.  Taking them out would, IMO, be one more step towards making the game feel less related to its predecessors than it already does.

The traits error happens when you have the first panel (the one where traits are listed) open when they age up.  Just switch to a different panel before having them blow out the candles and the trait should stick.  It's a bug, obviously, but at least an easy one to work around.

Why not just create them as teens in CAS and then age them up in game?  The birthday cake can be used at any time, so you can do it as soon as you load your new household.

I should have figured that out when I had one Sim call another and was disappointed to see the second Sim protesting in front of City Hall rather than talking on the phone. 

I can add in the Articles info when I load my game, since I have a Sim in the Journalism career who just got the article writing ability.

(Aside: I did say I was grumpy earlier.  Am over it by now.)

Edit:  Articles become level at the Freelance Writer position, which is Level 3.

To clarify my post, the game does randomly poof people.  My speculation is that this is what happened with the baby in your game.  It didn't really die, it got deleted and the game basically tells you to pretend it died.

Did the father have a high relationship with the kid?  It seems to me that the game just randomly poofs people that don't have strong relationship levels with the active family, and makes up a random death to explain it.   The fact that you read about it in the paper, and didn't get a separate popup notification, suggests that he didn't know the kid too well.

I just have the Sim eat the fruit straight from her inventory.  No fuss, no muss, no worrying about whether they'll use the right fruit when cooking.

Am I the only person who gets supremely annoyed by reading a thread title that suggests it is offering information, only to find out it is someone requesting information?  Bah.  Call it "Wanted - A Novel Writing Guide" or something. </grumpy>

While I agree that Sims look worse in game than in CAS, I have to agree with Kiki in that I think the lighting and general texturing is exceptional.  I find myself waiting for the morning light to start filtering through the windows, just because it looks so neat.  Unlike Kiki, I don't have a system that will make you jealous - my system is 2 years old, featuring 3gig of RAM and an Nvidia 7600GS, and the game runs effortlessly with all settings set to maximum (except for trees, I just don't care enough about trees to turn them up beyond medium). 

The most confusing part of romantic interactions - or any interactions, for that matter - is that switching "tones" tends to reset any progress you've made for that session.  So if the other Sim sees yours as alluring, then switches to a friendly interaction, they'll likely be back to "flirty" when you switch back to romance.  I think social interactions are the weakest point of the game.  Where in TS2 you had the chain of chat/joke/flirt actions until love happened (and then could do any interaction you wanted pretty much whenever you wanted), here you have flirt/different flirt/flirt some more, regardless of relationship level.

You *can* switch households.  It may lead to unwanted consequences but there is absolutely nothing stopping you from clicking "Switch active household" in the Edit Town UI. And they seem to be fairly adept at raising their kids - as in, they're not dropping dead or getting taken by the Social Worker (yet).

That is correct - After the Edit Town UI comes up, there is an icon with 2 houses on the left.  Click that to change active households.

After a Vista update killed my computer the other day, I had to reinstall all of my software.  In preparation, I backed up the Electronic Arts folder and moved it back after reinstalling the game, and everything was already there.

Have, not of. "They'd have..."  "Should have..."  I can even handle it if it's "should've". Whichever you choose, it is not "of"!   This particular mistake just makes be bonkers, especially in an otherwise inoffensive post. 

From your first post, I can't quite tell, but have you tried having 10 romantic interests at once?  Perhaps the want is worded badly.  (Sheer speculation, I've avoided the want precisely because I hated playing TS2's romance and popularity Sims so much.)

I read in another thread (discussing whether there were any differences between RZR and Retail) that they are apparently exactly the same, as the RZR crack works on the retail version just fine.