Unfortunately, those 20,000+ files were installed simultaneously. I started with a clean install, got download happy, and then ran the game. Well, I did some weeding out of stuff that crashed my game right away. For the most part, no problems, but some of the those strange crashes were occurring as noted in post 1. Crashes that make no sense and aren't really linked to anything. But I kinda used this as my excuse to do what I really needed to do anyway - lose some weight (from the game, not me; well, that's needed too I guess).
And honestly I probably could've done like you said with something as simple as S2CI and weeded out the unlikelies. Would've made things a little faster, unless it happened to be an unlikely. LOL. But I really was tired of half hour load times anyway. I could prepare and eat a meal and still not be loaded. I almost decided to just play CC free, but two seconds of Maxis ugliness convinced me that at least a little CC is necessary.
