The holiday stuff is patched directly into the base game, so you can't remove it.
If you're content with just hiding the clothes, use my holiday hider (check signature for download locations).

You could try to do a manual uninstall:
-Grab TSData\Res\Objects\objects.package out of compressed.zip from your TS2 disk(s), and replace the one in your current install.
-Remove TSData\Res\Catalog\Bins\H05.bundle.package and, if you have the 2006 HP, also H06.bundle.package.

This *should* do it. Apply the base game patch from the website afterwards to get your objects.package back up to date.

Well, even if you stupidly delete them from the install folder, you can still get them back from disk. TS2's files are easily accessible inside compressed.zip (bless whoever thought of this -- I hate the untransparant cabinets most games use).

Sure, that would work. Notownieregen just stops the automatic regeneration -- nothing is preventing you from using the spawner (or CAS) to create your own townies.

I use the exact formula given in the first post for my townies -- I now have about 35, and about 20 dormies. That's more than enough breeding material and employees for the next few generations.

Unless you have aging set to off, you do have some mod which impacts aging, or a mod conflict that causes this somehow.

Run the HCDU, and if this doesn't show anything, do a binary search.

Well the code hasn't been fixed since Pets, so likely the bug exists still.

If you want to test this, take the mod out, make sure you begin a clean neighbourhood (no Sim character files should exist after creating it), then create a Sim and call the maid. If you get an error, the bug still exists.

In a clean neighbourhood (no Sims at all), the NPC generator is borked.
The first time you call a certain NPC, say a maid, the game has to generate it. This fails horribly.

If you play without clean templates, or pregenerate your NPCs using the tree or mailbox, you never encounter this bug.

They should do the same thing. Either should be fine.

Hard links/junctions work in Vista. As do symbolic links.

I'm not certain I fully understand the difference between the two, and have really no idea WTF a hardlink clone/symbolic link clone is.

Doesn't SaraMK have a clean template which leaves just the Tricous in?

Seems to work for me though -- I can't delete them anymore after adding both product and version.

Both. But as I am not that interested in them anyway, I haven't wasted too much time debugging them.

Oh, that mod. Never worked for me, I wouldn't recommend anyone using it.

AFAIK, that shouldn't be possible. Alien abduction has a 100% impregnating chance, for valid Sims.

Valid Sims are male adults with 3 or more days left -- or whatever a mod changes this to. Smonaff has a mod which enables alien pregnancy for females as well, and the Inteen opens it up for teens and young adults, too.

Without twojeff's greater odds mod the chance of an alien abduction is astronomically small (no pun intended) by the way.

H&M and Celebrations screw up the internal version number. IIRC, their code seems to be based on OFB, but the version number claims to be higher than Seasons.
This means that if your last EP is OFB, you run the game from the H&M/Celeb disk. But then all mods assume you have Seasons, so if they depend on the version check, you've got a problem.
If your last EP is Pets or Seasons, you run the game from the Pets/Seas disk, but you still encounter the version number problem. Fortunately in most cases Pets and Seasons run the same (or compatible) code so this is far less likely to cause problems than running an OFB+H&M/Celeb game.

Amber: not certain if that avoids it; I wouldn't trust Windows to keep my files save...
In any case making sure the properties exist avoids the problem entirely.

Invisigoth: sure, but the clothing items still bear the star of shame.

Editing clothing by this method has the dual purpose of removing the star of shame, and making it undeletable from within CAS. But as mentioned I haven't actually tried it with custom content.

That BIOS setting (AGP vs PCI) just controls which slot is checked first for a videocard, it doesn't do anything else.

EAxis changed the property sets for clothing in Pets, and as a result most clothing property sets from previous expansions now result in clothing being marked with the custom content star if this property set is read from the My Documents folder.
This affects any changed items, such as my hiders, outerwear enablers, etc..
A particulary dangerous result of this is that it allows these clothes to be deleted from in CAS, resulting in base game file corruption.

The most common workaround given is to place these property sets in the Catalog Bin, but there's also an actual fix.

Make sure the following properties are in each clothing's property set if placed in My Documents:

version (dtUInteger) = N
product (dtUInteger) = N

Base game: version 1 product 1
EP 1 Uni: version 2 product 2,
EP 2 NL: version 2 product 3,
EP3 OFB: version 3 product 4,
SP1 FFS: version 3 product 5,
SP2 GLS: version 3 product 6,
EP4 Pets: version 3 product 7,
EP5 Seas: version 3 product 8,
SP4 Celeb: version 3 product 9,
SP5 H&M: version 3 product A

The Xmas items are labelled according to which pack they first appeared in:
Xmas 2005: version 2 product 1
Xmas 2006: version 3 product 1

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Combined with the trick to set the "Creator" property to all zeroes, this might allow you to set custom content clothing as game defaults, allowing townies to use them or Sims to grow up in them. This is untested.

Sure it is.
If your "wolf friend" was already on the lot at the moment the game decided to spawn a wolf, this is normal.

Antiredundancy limits the number of duplicate NPCs, but it does not and cannot fully eliminate it. If for whatever reason you need a second, or third (or more) iteration of a certain NPC, it will be spawned.

Not Smonaff's mod that enables alien pregnancy for females as well, or the Kitten Killer. I already checked those.

Look for a Squinge mod. He must've done this -- I think he modded every single BHAV in the game at some point!

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Oh, and teens can only get caught sneaking out when they're leaving, not returning. If the parent is in the same room as the teen at the moment the teen gets the sneak out action (1 AM), the teen is caught. The parent will then lecture the teen.
On return, the teen can get caught by the police (random check), but parents will ignore them as they walk past them.

Abduction of children is not possible in an unmodded game.
The abduction code specifically checks for children and young adults, and disables the interaction for them.

It's trivial to enable though, so you might very well have a mod that does this.

Rather looks like my kind of typos (ohm rather than oh,) :p

Works fine for me. I'm playing in my monitor's native res of 1680x1050.

Looks like it deals with the loss of smartness. Not 100% certain though.

Have you tried disabling the shaders?

boolProp useShaders false

If the game runs with this setting, you are running into the bug.

Nvidia releases new drivers all the time, so I don't take people's word for it they are using the latest drivers. Often people assume the CD drivers are the newest...

Nvidia drivers have had problems with TS2 before, but a recent release should have fixed it. Otherwise try their latest betas.

Make sure you're using the latest drivers from nvidia.com.