Kitchen Clustering and Stereo Lag

I have two and a half minor problems, which I am going to assume are not really technical but more like gameplay annoyances.

My first is kitchen clustering. Whenever a household gets over like 5-6 people in it I usually start focusing on 2 or 3 and leave the rest to do their own thing. What tends to happen though is everyone eventually ends up in the kitchen in a tight cluster unable to do anything until I manually break them up. It starts when one person goes into the kitchen and sits down to eat, now for some reason other sims can queue interactions with that sitting sim even though it wont work. So they just stand behind their chair constantly queuing and dropping impossible actions. Other sims come and try to interact with either of them with the same results. The standing sim is too busy trying to congratulate the one in the chair and the one in the chair is obviously too engrossed in their salmon dinner to care. After a few game hours everyone I wasn't controlling ends up standing in the kitchen trying to interact with each other, mostly unsuccessfully. Once their motives start to drop they either can't leave because they are boxed in, or as they try to leave another sim interrupts them with a hug or something. It's a minor annoyance, but I'm always having to stop what I'm doing to direct each and every one of them out of the kitchen, and with 8 or 10 people to direct it can eat a lot of my time. I've tried multiple kitchens, like one on floor two and one on floor 6, but that creates new problems when a sim tries to serve food and ends up going up and down the stairs placing plates on tables 4 floors apart. It only seems to delay the clustering a little anyway. So I'm just wondering if there's something I can do to design a building that deals with this issue, or if maybe there is a mod that wont let standing sims try to interact with sims in a chair.

My second issue is stereo lag, whenever I mouse over a stereo or click on it to turn it off/change the station, my game lags if not completely freezes for a few seconds. My guess is it's going through all the songs in all the playlists to check them for genre or whatever. I don't think it's a corrupted install or any sort of bug on my part (it also happens with no custom content installed or enabled), and I have tried defragging the Sims 2 files in case that was the cause, so I think it just takes a lot of CPU to do whatever it does and my PC is old and in poor health these days. My question here is if I were to mod the game files so stereos only list the two or three channels I ever listen to, would that speed it up a bit or cause any serious issues? Related to that, my second and a half problem, is phones are the same way though not as bad. So maybe I could remove a bunch of the pie menu options I never use to help with those as well?