I don't think so.  You can learn spells and then cure yourself of being a witch, but I don't think you can cast spells aftward.  I've never tried it though.

Just an update.  

Having narrowed down the missing items to Free Time, I uninstalled it after making a backup, started the game and entered a sim's lot.  There weren't any missing items.  I then reinstalled Free Time and went back into the same sim's lot and viola!  Everything works just fine.  

So, apparently my computer must have had some sort of hiccup.  I don't know if it was because of some of the custom items I had that were installed or if something went awry when it was installed, but at this point the reason why doesn't matter.  Woot!  :happy8:

Thanks again for the advice!

Thank you so much for the advice.  I've done as you said, with the exception of the patches.  I'll get to those once I'm sure things are straightened out with the content.

I still was unable to view many of the icons/missing items so I got curious and I sorted through all the content piece by piece trying to determine where I had gone wrong.  I found the Wiki page for Free Time and it seems like most of the missing content originated from Free Time.  I don't recall having any problems when I installed it, but who knows.

I should probably do a backup of all my sims and neighborhoods and then uninstall Free Time and then reinstall it again.  Do you think that might fix whatever problem I'm having?

Hello all.  I'm wondering if anyone might be able to help me with a little problem.  I've searched for help on the net, but I haven't come up with anything conclusive.

I've been out of the scene for awhile now.   I ended up reading about some of the new things here and on other forums and I decided to go ahead and purchase the EP and Stuff packs that I either hadn't gotten before or were new.

All the installs went just fine but I found out the hard way that not all the custom content I had before, like Inteen, were not compatible.  To be honest, they didn't even cross my mind when I started playing the game again, until I started having problems.

The first problem I found were missing item icons from the purchase menus.  There's a thread on MTS2 where a user had an identical problem as me.  Not sure if it's ok to link here or not, so I won't, but the thread title is "Invisible/missing items" by Maybug283.  In a nutshell, the items have no icon but can be bought, when you go to place them the grid shows underneath it, but you can't see the item, and once placed it's like it was never purchased.

I currently have all the EPs and Stuff packs with the exception of Celebration stuff, which is bizarre because I could have sworn I had that installed before.  I had bought a Deluxe version of the software and I could swear it was included.  In any case, I haven't applied any fixes to the AL EP because I've read of a lot of people having problems afterward.  I guess if this is what is causing my problems then I'll do the updates, but I'd just assume wait until things are less buggy.

The other thing I guess I should mention in all fairness to those who might try to help is that I found that I had installed a few things incorrectly.  Please don't beat me too badly.    I had installed all the package files for Insim, and as previously mentioned, I also had Inteen in my download folder.  My only excuse is that it'd been about a year since I played.  I should mention that Inteen seemed to work fine, but it caused some of the player interactions to not appear correctly, like witches not having the option to cast spells, etc.  

Other than that I didn't have any issues that I'm aware of.  I have since removed Inteen and corrected the install of Insim with the newest version.  I dumped all my downloads and have started to add them back one by one and testing the game to see if they work ok.  

In regards to my missing items, is this something that I should consider a reinstall for, or is there some other way to fix these.  It's not the end of the world either way.

Thanks much for the help!

That's nuts!  Are they on drugs?  I think that they will have more legal issues than they bargained for, that is, if people will actually take a stand and be willing to follow through with it.

I guess that makes me all the more thankful that I don't belong to their boards.

Make sure that you have only one of the Insim package files installed.  I had a similar thing happen to me and it was because I hadn't read the instructions for installing the Insim package.

I also got the Sims 2 Hack Conflict Detection Utility and that helped me to find some other problems as well.  It's fast and it works quite well.

Yesterday I had an NPC sim stuck literally standing on a swing on a vacation lot.  I got tired of her whining about needing food, needing sleep, etc. so I enabled cheat, shift-clicked her and forced an error, then clicked reset.  Afterward she was standing on the ground and she then left the lot.  

In your case you want to make sure that you click reset rather than delete so you don't lose your sim.  In my case I don't think it would have made a difference since the sim was an NPC, but I think it's good habit to reset rather than delete.