Try this?  You'll still need Uni and OFB.  I'm not sure about Pets, but probably that too. 

I'm not playing with this set much, so I didn't test it very thoroughly.  Be careful if you decide to check it out; don't forget to take out the original before you put this in.  Game crashes can corrupt your 'hood.

3) Corrupt cache files?  Delete groups.cache, accessory.cache, et al.

I have some 15 households, and about 75% have the zzz's due to a hard reset while they were asleep.  The stuck SFX option doesn't do anything.  It's not unbearable, since so far it has resolved itself in every case, after the affected sim has had a good night's sleep.  However, I have many, many opportunities left to test, if you want to fiddle with the box option further.

ETA: I don't even know if the option was touched at all in the update, but Nuke Stuck SFX still doesn't work for Zzzs.

There have been numerous sightings of multiple instances of townies.  It doesn't necessarily mean there's more than one character file.  I would have exited without saving, but I don't think it has been determined that it's BFBVFS-inducing.  Have you checked in SimPE to be sure you don't have a third SS member?  If not, just take out nossrespawn until you get another or three, then put it back.

I wouldn't copy or move the character files of a shared 'hood.  I suspect that might lead to corruption, if you tried to insert the new townies into an existing 'hood.  The Neighborhood file links to all the character files, so they'd have to stay together.

What I was thinking was that I'd do terrain surgery on a regular 'hood containing the custom townies.  If you shared Lake Jelenedra, I'd rename it, surgery the terrain and then get on with building and playing.   Of course, templates are even better since they offer the flexibility of taking out the noregen hacks and filling any 'hoods that you might deem underpopulated.  It's just that I'm not so picky about populated 'hoods, because there aren't very many offered.

This only works if you're willing to trash the first 'hood you made.  However, the general idea does work well if you want to share the entire 'hood.

Jelenedra, if you do experiment with this, would you report back, or share your 'hood?  Other people with matching EPs could play with your townies if they're willing to take them as a whole 'hood rather than a template.  With SimPE, people could even switch terrains if they wanted. 

I also take an age to get around to playing a new 'hood.  I don't even have the attention span to finish the townie job; I get bored and go off to play my older 'hoods for a week or two.  Eventually, I get back to making townies, locals, socials, then building -- it takes me months.  As annoying as it is, I find I don't really want the same townies.  I'm much more interested in new faces, so I've used Madam Mim's templates and swallowed some other neighbourhoods as a whole, to satisfy myself.

No.  The discussion is about which names get you the 'hood flyover.

Are you sure?  I tested them in my mac game, and they loaded for me.  I think we have the same game config (all EPs up to BV), no?

After some testing, I confirmed for myself what you and Gwenke described.  When I loaded the same 'bot shop in an AL game (windows side this time), I found that emptying the owner's inventory doesn't stick any more.  I forgot to check if loading the owner's home lot between customer visits saves the correct state of his inventory, but that would be too annoying to implement in my regular play, anyhow.

Ai, what a headache.  Now I'm going to have to resort to pushing produce and craftables, if I want to maintain an economy in any new 'hoods.

Well yes, twice as many restarts is what makes it less efficient.

Because of its intrinsic efficiency, being completely ignorant of what the problem could be doesn't much matter, when you do a binary search.
The method you describe has much more to gain by putting some thought into making up the testing groups, and in fact there's no reason to limit yourself to just two groups to begin with, since you're going to have to test every group.  In other words, some guessing becomes a lot more advantageous when you're looking for a lot of bad files, which is the way most people in this situation commence searching.

Just to clarify, do you get the dialog about an empty inventory even when you are playing the visiting customer, or not even that?  I don't usually visit the same shop again on the same trip, because I'm not interested in the exploit.  I did see empty shelves just recently, when I forgot that the robot shop had run out of sentries.  That shop is never visited by the owner any more, now that it has 10 stars.

I suppose it could be a difference in my mac game -- I don't think I have any hacks that would affect this behaviour. 

The greater problem is assuming that it's just one bad download.  Binary search is only efficient if you're sure that the problem is in just one file, or just one folder. 
Mind you, if you're in the habit of letting problems go uninvestigated, it's far more likely that you'll run into this wall sooner, rather than later.

*Psst, download folder is geometrically reduced each time, not exponentially.

Actually, notovny's post is not clear about what happens on a repeat visit, if you wait for the owner to restock.  The first part of his paragraph discusses what happens if you leave before the shelves have been refreshed.

My experience hasn't been the same as yours.  I play all craftables and produce as off-site businesses, and some of them are visited by the owners only once a generation.  Periodically, some items do run out during a customer's visit and I get a pop-up that says the owner's inventory is depleted.  On subsequent visits by other playable customers, those shelves remain empty until I play the owner's house in rotation.  Once I have the owner replenish his inventory at home, his staff at the shop restock when it's visited again by more playable customers.

The only thing I'm unsure about is produce.  All my neighbourhoods have so much surplus that I've never seen produce or fish stands go empty.

Is it possible to extend/ fold/ merge this with nouniprotect, so that dorms can be built and furnished on the same principle as apartments?

Brain fart.  I simply forgot that they were missing from the catalog, and so didn't modify them.  I updated the Spooky archive to include the fixed columns.  There's also a smaller zip of just the columns. 

Do let me know if they work for you, and thanks for pointing out my oversight.

Are you sure that all the noregen hacks you can think of is actually the complete set?
Look at the clean templates thread in Peasantry; there's a list there.  Make sure you have all current versions.

Did I forget to include the columns in that Spooky archive?  I might have missed editing them... hmm.
Will check in my game and get back to you.

But notovny himself confirmed in that post that you can just wait until the owner has restocked, and this will properly deplete his inventory.


Edit is mine, for clarity.

I don't remember now which thread I saw this posted, nor by whom, but loading the window and lights after other Store items fixes the lighting issues.  It worked for me.

My apologies to you.
Did you try searching the ATI site for info on that Catalyst thingie?  It could very well be that Spore is too demanding on your GPU for anti-aliasing, though.

Wut?  Umm, no. 
It's up to the vendor to choose which pair of CPU/GPU they build into the system.

BRY = Business Runs You.
Did you know there is a shiny search function on this forum?

It has a function Make Bugger Off... which will give you options on sims that are seen as being on the lot.  If you can't call a neighbour, then it means that the game sees them as being in the communal area, rather than being properly in its apartment hole.  If the neighbour isn't properly stowed away, then the hack doesn't refresh their motives.

Though I haven't experienced this particular problem, I assume that firing the BRY option will force them out of neverland, so that they're either in the communal areas, or properly stowed away.

But, but... I don't want free asp!   I prefer to keep them miserable. 

What's most annoying is that the wants/ fears tend to obsess over the same damn things, if there's any cash reserve on hand.  It's tedious to perpetually stuff their inventories with sculptures to keep the cashbox low.

See, that's the way I'd like to buy stuff.  It's true that I could do it myself in principle, but then I think, why should I reinvent the wheel when jesslla and witch (and various nerdly friends) have already done it?  I could just ask.

HCDU isn't always definitive.  You can check by taking your other CC out, and only leaving in these two hacks.  I guess you can also wait for someone else to report with the same problem.