Woah, got alot of answers fast, but I'm wondering where you got the hack that changed the pond to the rather dark-green color there Khaki.  IMHO, it just seems strange since you commonly fast forward during the night while the sims are asleep and I have the SmartLights on so that my lights arn't blaring all night long and then BAM, the pond sticks out in the middle of my front yard.

Later on after a minute of googling:  http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=225473 , found the hack that you were talking about Khaki or atleast I think its right.  About to test it in a second.

If you were able to find a "legal" or legal version of XP, you could easily reformat (the "know-how to wipe the computer") right from the install.  All you really have to do is get your hands on a CD and a CD-Key and you'd be fine to get XP back on your shiny new labtop.

As for LS, I'm not exactly sure how the system works nor have I actually took the time to buy it and play it.  Sorry, can't help you there, but if you can find a friend with a copy of XP and maybe a key,  you could install XP and hope that you keep your game progress if you dont reformat.

Anyone?

You may have to look up a program that will delete the file before its put into use.  There are such programs that can go and try deleting the file before Windoze fully boots up, which is creating your problem.  I had to do this once because I got the same problem when I tried to update my Service Pack and it seemed fine afterwards.  Sorry but I cannot recall what program I used.
Also, it might be along the lines of what Pes said.  Theres a big possibility that it might be corrupted data and the only fix I ever really know of would be to reformat the whole hard drive, but that would be a last resort course of action since your gonna lose EVERY bit of data on your computer to rewrite every cluster.

Is there any simple way to stop how in Seasons the ponds end up being brighter than my lights at night.  It just seems a little strange to me how the pond is once of the brightest things in the whole lot until morning. 

uhm, how exactly did you call up the limo? is it via some hack or is there a normal way to do that? if its a hack or somethign then that might be a side effect because a while ago i had a hack sorta like that and i lost my whole family :/

nah i looked up that boolProp cheat and all it does is change how the neighborhood is viewed, but if you go to the each lot on SimPE (im no where near an expert in it but i can take the hints from some of the code) and you change the values i stated above but i was just wondering if anyones made a cheat that has already taken care of that if someone doesnt like the concrete ocean spawning from each downtown lot 

I was wondering if there was an easy way to change all the downtown lots to have a grass terrain instead of a conrete terrain or if there is a hack that would change it, i was able to change one lot from changing (forgot what the variable was in SimPE) "lotterrain-concrete-01" to "lotterrain-test-01" but is there an easy way to change all of them?