Ah, exactly. Not just me, then. I doubt it's got anything to do with my computer's resources; it's pretty friggin' sweet.

ETA: No Vista here. And no custom terrain. Nothing else lags - it's not really even lag. Just impossible to click buttons.

I just made a new, totally clean hood yesterday using empty templates. I made one sim and moved her into a 5x5 lot. The only new things I've downloaded lately are Pooklet's default face templates. Whenever I click on an object or sim and attempt to click on the "More..." option on any pie menu, I have to click like 400 times before it will register. All other pie menu options work just fine, and once I do succeed in clicking More, I have no problems with the new options.

Known bug? Hood's dead before it began? I haven't tried other hoods yet.

Not really. Bodyshop takes so long to load that I use it only when I must. If CAS had the functionality of Bodyshop, I assume it would have a terrible effect on the game load time. CAS is good enough for some purposes. It is a weird system, though.

phyliss, that is my longtime favorite joke!

I'm trying my hand at this, so I'm trying not to look at the previous entries yet. I have a hard time being creative with house building and decorating. It's been fun so far!

neko, that could be art! What do you see in the graphics card explosion, hmm?

Actually, what I had found was their ID numbers in the form of 0xD35657CO. Later, I thought to use the sim browser to look at the N005_0001 package files in order to see if any were missing. I found that about a third of the character files were completely gone, confirmed by looking in the neighborhood folder. I don't know how long they were disappearing for, since I wouldn't necessarily have noticed that two out of three pizza delivery people had vanished. There was a whole chunk from 0210 to 0227 that was gone, and that's where the player sims that I lost were.

In happier news, I found a more recent backup that I didn't even know I had, which puts me much farther than I thought. That backup has all character files intact. 

Well, I guess I'm stumped. I downloaded SimPE and used the neighborhood browser to look for the vanished sims. There is no trace, except in other sims' memories, where they will have memories of Unknown. Actually, the last I played the game, I did check memories and everything was as before - sims remembered the vanished sims, including their names, with the right thumbnails. When I look in SimPE, though, the names are definitely gone.

I figured out the missing sims ID numbers by doing that, but I don't think that does me any good. Does it? There are more missing sims than I realized - I think even some townies and dormies have vanished. I'm inclined to think there is some kind of catastrophic hard drive problem, but I haven't noticed any other kinds of files going missing! I did do a disk scan, nothing seems to have changed. It's not even my computer, it's my partner's. I'm getting a new laptop in a few days, so I guess I'll just use that one and get away from the computer of doom.

My last backup is a generation ago; I think I'd rather just start over than do all that again.

So, computer over?

Let me preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm doing, so feel free to suggest the easiest/most obvious fix because I likely didn't try it. My custom neighborhood seems to be going up in flames. The computer I play on can boot from either Vista or XP. The game is installed on both. Today, I loaded the game in XP, and the neighborhood was full of new bugs, the most troubling being two houses that used to contain families are now listed as for sale, with no sign of the families that used to live in them. Also, a lot of sims were walking around pure white, which I've seen before and has resolved itself in the past. Finally, my main legacy house has a normal family portrait on startup, but two sims are totally missing when I load it, to the point that their own family members have no relationship with them, even in the family tree.

Anyway, the XP partition is being kind of screwy lately in general, so my first attempt to fix this was to move my files over to the Vista partition and load the game from there. This actually got the two missing families back in their houses, but the game crashed when I tried to load one of them. The two missing sims are still missing in the same way as before, and now a child from another family has gone missing as well, with her father still waving at her. The white skins problem seems to be gone, although the family portrait still shows that in one house.

Does the neighborhood sound salvageable? Are these sims retrievable? I have no hacks, and I did try taking out my custom content folder, which changed nothing.