I'm having a new problem with the game now, and according to the clean installer I don't have any hacks left. It's a minor problem, but still, for the money I paid I want the game to work correctly! I think we all do. LOL Anyway, I noticed that when my Sims have conversations, many times the little image in the "talk balloon" would be scrambled, looking more like a barcode. Then I noticed that in their action queys, some of the icons are also missing. Especially "move" and "Taxi." Finally, when I looked at one Sim's memories, all of the icons were gone. Just green and red squares. If you click on a square, it will tell you what the memory was and show you the picture. But you have to click. On a sim that was born in-game and has a rather lengthy history, that's pretty time consuming.
I would like to say that I am quite surprised at the amount of posts in this thread, good thing it didn't close. Well Kristal I haven't had your problem happen yet but I did have this weird occurance happen. Unfortuanely I can't find the snapshot but what basically what happened was my sim was massaging his gf 5 feet away! He was doing the action of massaging and his gf was doing the rolling shoulders up and down and such. It was quite weird, never happened to me before.
Instant Death You can consider yourself fortunate. My Sims would drop dead the instant class was announced. My problem was caused by the insiminator. I had to remove everything from my downloads directory and re-introduce them in smaller groups to find the culprit. 1. Quit the sims2 2. Rename your Downloads directory. (typically "c:\Document and settings\username\my documents\ea games\the sims2\downloads" or "desktop\my documents\ea games\the sims2\downloads") to downloads.backup and create a new empty directory call downloads in the same parent directory 3. relaunch the the sims2 and confirm that the game is functioning properly. (if it is not, you may wish to consider re-installation) 4. Copy files you can identify from your backup, back to the downloads directory(things clearly marked like wall and floor) 5. test play the sims 2, if all is ok repeat step 4 with additional files until it's not ok. 6. load each file from the last group individually until the error re-occurs. 7. move the bad file to a new "bad" directory 8. go to step 4 and repeat until all files have been move to bad or restored to downloads. 9. delete the offending files, or replace with updated versions.