Patched, and then I sent a pair of my sims to France and everything was working fine. I saved while they were there and went back the next day to continue. Now, every time I try to do anything quest-related (give mineral to sim, ask sim out on date for someone else), my sim resets and teleports to wherever they were before I requested that command. I took AM out and disabled all custom content and it still does it.

*Repeated headdesk*

I'm having a very annoying bug - when going on vacation, vacation worlds will load but with no sims in them. If I save the game and exit I essentially saved into the vacation world with no one in it; accessing Riverview by starting a new game reveals that the lot my sims were on is Totally Gone.

Thankfully I pulled my sims from the backup thingy but even removing the cache files and CC/mods won't fix the vacation issue. Any further ideas for this apparently non-beefy, vacationless player?

ETA: This happened both in the version I was previously running (1.8 or whatever) and the recent update of a day or so ago.

Problem SOLVED. (Yee!)

Uninstalled the game and all EPs, removed Securom. Went to reinstall and realized that the base TS2 .mdf/.mds files I was using for install were the 4 CD multilanguage version (Yarr! ), and all EPs after that were US version - not sure but I think that had a large chunk to do with it.

Got Sims 2 Deluxe DVD, installed it, and poof. It works perfectly. There is still a slight lag at loading but it is very much within the "expected" range, seems to be <1-2 min instead of 15+. There is no screeching halt to my system's responsiveness when I close the game either.

Thanks to all of you for your help and advice! I am not yet awesome, but I am less non-awesome than I was before. Much appreciated.

Sorry to let this drop off the face of the earth.

I have 1GB of RAM (PC 3200).

The game seems to be running slightly better since I tweak the process to High Priority in Task Manager once it starts. I can't upgrade the RAM anymore due to motherboard limitations, and I am a po' Breadpazoid so adding more really isn't an option either.

I guess there seems to be not much to do about it software wise, but I am getting a Mac in a few months, so I guess my problems will be solved then. Does TS2 and its add ons run directly under Leopard or would I need to do Bootcamp and use XP?

Thanks you guys.

I did run the game in fullscreen, but switched to windowed when I first installed it and had this problem, and have been playing in windowed ever since. The problem continues. Yes, I do close out unneeded stuff in Task Manager. Once the game gets going, I have little to no problem playing it - very few if any laggy moments, no frame rate problems, nothing.

I know for sure that the CPU only rarely hits 100% when I'm trying to get the game to run. I wonder if it is a RAM issue then, because when I close the game, it does the same thing, only doesn't freeze as long. The game will disappear but the .exe will show in the Task Manager still taking up a couple hundred thousand K or so. It takes maybe 5 minutes for the exe to disappear from the roster, and in that time, my whole computer is pretty much immobile.

As I am not good at troubleshooting RAM issues, how would I check this out?

Thanks for your continuing help!

I got that to work - thanks you guys!

However...it still freezes for 10-15 minutes at startup. *headdesk*

So I guess it's not the video after all. Any ideas, folks? (PS: Thanks for all your help so far!)

I was looking for that switch, but no luck. If anyone remembers what it is, I'll...well, I'll just be very grateful. LOL

My Athlon is old but not ancient, AMD 1500+ I think - definitely not dual core. This system has run conflict free (minus the motherboard, which interestingly has a conflict with its own onboard audio card - I have a PCI to fix that) and nearly seamlessly since I got it running ~5 years ago. I wish I could say the same for my Intels. LOL

Oh, I didn't even put my operating system...LOL. I'm running XP SP2. Not getting any popups, though I do tell my firewall not to let the sims connect to the internet. Could that have anything to do with it?

I've run all these programs on XP SP1 before, and had no problems (though it was a totally different computer - Intel based, the one I'm on is Athlon based, self built).

Could that do it?

I tried, but nothing. It was doing this before the custom content, too.

Hi all,

Once Upon A Time I asked this question on the sims 2 EA forum and it disappeared into the mist, so...

Whenever I start up TS2 (I have Pets and Seasons, in that order - nothing else), I will get the 2-second EA logo, then it will go into the Sims 2 ad/startup video. You know, click on it, it stops and then you switch to the Sims 2 loading screen. Right? Wrong!

I click on it, it freezes. For 10-20 minutes before it decides to change to the loading screen. I let the video finish playing by itself, it still freezes. Reinstalls were no help. It did this before the expacks and it does it after. Right now I have a nocd patch and that didn't change it either.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!