secretlywritten, have you ever installed a patch for any Sims 2 game??

I just wonder if you are trying to open the patch file from the internet, instead of downloading it?? Go to the page the patch is on, click the link, when the dialogue box opens choose save. Save the patch to a place you can find it easily on your computer. Put in the AL disk, go to the patch and double click on it. It is a self extracting exe. file. It will patch the game and then tell you the update was sucessful. Give this a try and see if it woks for you.