I actually have one of feeEssen's meshes in my game (the bird perch that's pictured on page 1 of this thread) only because it came with somewhat better wood recolors by Hairfish of Mermaid Cove. I was very unpleasantly surprised when I first saw the base in all its ugly colored glory in Buy Mode!

I can adapt how I play my sims to accommodate weather and the risk of getting struck by lightning, but without a hack or cheat I can't do much about sims that are not currently under my control that haven't learned that sitting in a hot tub in a thunderstorm is now dangerous, short of moving all hot tubs indoors.

Haven't tried it yet, looks good on the surface.... but I wonder what would happen if you tried to install Delphy's Organiser with Q-Xpress? The link is there to do so..... 

I use Insimenator OBJ edition, and I have all the sectionals available in the catalog. There's a Insim pie menu option to hide them from buy mode, but I like being able to put the sectional I need on my lot without having to spawn it in live mode. I've never used the SIM version, though,  so I don't know if it's supposed to work like that or not.

Have you tried deleting groups.cache?

While this is less "whore clothes" and more an artifact of the days when we had just gotten Bodyshop and were figuring out what we could do with it, it's revealing enough. This is from an old site called Simsylvania that made Goth stuff for Sims 1 but was abandoned in place around the time that Sims 2 came out.
http://www.simsylvania.com/TheSims2/Luna_fa_normtops1.htm



The last one is a teen outfit, the others are adult.

Yes; among other annoyances, Macrovision makes Safedisc, which doesn't actually keep anyone from being able to pirate the Sims but is a good target to curse out when your legitimately obtained CD won't read. 

Hmm... that explains why some people on the BBS were saying that they had modified Graphics Rules.sgr and the Seasons patch wouldn't install because of it. Why you would mess with that file is lost on me, though.

I've also heard "video card under the minimum requirements for TS2", though this seems to be a common excuse for every graphic problem anyone has.

Probably, you'd be missing some of the Maxis graphics and animations, but not anything incredibly gamebreaking if you had custom content to compensate. When I was playing Sims 1 back in the day there were quite a few cloned custom objects that would work if you didn't have the right expansion pack, but would cause your sims to give you "missing animation!" thought bubbles while using them. Then again, a lot of cloned objects without the right expansion pack would disappear in live mode, show up but be completely non-functional, or just crash your game. :p

I have an old graphics card (GeForce 4 MX 440), that does not know what a pixel shader is. I don't get the snow cursor or any option to toggle on or off the snow cursor, I don't get fish in ponds (though my sims can still go fishing), and I don't get fish in aquariums since EA broke it around Nightlife. :/
I've heard people claim that some of those come back if you use "boolprop useshaders true" regardless of whether your graphics card can actually use pixel shaders, but I don't want to stress my poor custom-content overloaded Sims 2 game any more by trying to do it.

I have SimPE, but it's overkill for me. I'm no hacker, and I have no creative talent. I just want to make sure my files work right.

I would love to have a better, single program for recategorizing clothing and hair, flagging problem files (because they're in the wrong directory, too high poly, duplicates, empty packages, hacks which conflict with other hacks, hacks that came with something else I downloaded and are a surprise to me, are missing the mesh, are an abandoned mesh, etc.....), deleting without leaving a bigger mess behind, batch-fixing custom objects for OFB or Pets compatibility, and all that jazz.   

Character editing would be nice too, but it's not as essential to me as keeping the downloads folder under control.

I am not awesome in technical matters, but I am a WoW player and I might be able to help with some son bribery here.
Has he tried messing with the "sound channels" slider under Audio Options? It was added recently, and it's been set wrong by default for quite a few people who have had to pull it towards the left side to get their sound working right again.
http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww01656p1
If all else fails, Blizzard's tech support is generally more useful than EAs and actually makes an effort to fix stuff.