I have a dual experience with ATI Tray Tools. When I had my first video, X300SE based, I could not get latest ATI drivers work right - I got BSOD on each Shut Down or Stand By, although gaming was stable. Only ATI Tray Tools helped get rid of that BSOD.
But when I upgraded to ATI HD3650 - my current video (it even does not have active cooler, just a radiator), ATI Tray Tools gave BSOD on every Hibernate. So I switched back to latest Catalyst. And now my Sims 3 is stable - no crash since 2.june (I played it only for some hours though, but anyway - no real CTDs or BSODs, except those well-known game loading CTDs with awesomemod installed and left xxx.cache). My graphic settings are all on maximal, except resolution. And my PC is not even Dual Core - just P4 with 2GB RAM and XP + SP3.

So really weird, when it works and when not.
Oh, BTW, I have disabled everything related to ATI Hotkey poller and ATI External Event Utility (services, drivers). Maybe that makes the game more stable ?  Mystery.

Quoting someone from somewhere:


That was for Spore. And now the same for Sims 3. So no clue for the reason of crashes, sorry.

Obviously playing with CIL scripts is not safe so the problems are guaranteed.. for (awe)some time Reverse engineering, that's the name of the game. Why, oh, why EA could not give us some bits of open source to play with so we could create our community game Sims X-Generation (just dreaming).

For me awesomemod is more awesome than buggy  but still buggy.

The same issue with losing sound in CAS. It wroks the same way like I have used Alt-Tab to switch away  - the same fade out effect. But the sound never goes back when I exit CAS. Only restart helps. It seems , Sim 3 somhow thinks that I have made the game window inactive by alt-tabbing. So it frees DirectSound buffer to other applications or something like that...

Thanks for that hint about Cache.package files - if I do not delete them, I cannot start the game - crash while loading and bunch of crash dump files with "bad memory written" or smth. like that.

Curious - what about that d3dx9_31.dll file in the framework? Without it the game gets stuck at the very beginning. Why are you overriding Direct3D, is it some hack again? 

Anyway - great mod, thanks.