Very lovely. Thank you!

I have successfully used the *mod that dares not speak its name* to age NPCs, townies etc down. (and up) As everyone says Simblender can do everything that aformentioned unsupported mod can do, you can probably use Simblender to do this too.

 

Nice, but the Radeon HD 5450 is not a gaming card. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5450,2549-13.html

Well, first thing is to check is if the problem persists when you remove your Downloads folder from the game. If everything then works ok and the pet goes to work as it should, it's obviously something in that folder causing the problem. Figuring out what the problem file is...that's the fun part.

WCIF Sims is another great place to post WCIFs.

Not really, because an item that crashes your game may do so because of a conflict with another piece of cc that is in your game but not necessarily in anyone else's. Some months ago I downloaded a toy from modthesims: it crashed my game every time. I had to come to the conclusion that it was conflicting with something else in my game - no one else seemed to have any problems with it. Although you can try the HCDU from Simwardrobe...it's often very useful.
I think you just have to bite the bullet & put aside a weekend to dedicating yourself to finding the offending item! Don't forget to remove your Saved Sims folder too...that's often the source of nasties. Good luck. I feel your pain.

Great, here's some more stuff:
Fantastic Church Set at ATS here: http://www.aroundthesims2.com/objects/sets_downtown/007/index.html
Very simple set here: http://www.blackypanther.de/include.php?path=content/download.php&contentid=2220&PHPKITSID=736a170bf3e4d8700ddf6fefa5b4f55c

 

This is so weird that I just had to share...
A few nights ago I went to play my game and nada. A slight whirring from the disc drive, but aside from that nothing at all. No splash screen, nothing. It was doubly strange because I'd been playing about 5 hours earlier and had downloaded nothing and altered nothing at all in my game files in the interim. So I tried all the usual things to get it to play, still nothing. I concluded that my drive was broken. Then I tried to play Fallout 3. Discovered drive was not broken. 
By now I had accepted that something in my game was totally borked and decided to test without CC, as you do. Started dragging my Downloads folder to the desktop. All was going swimmingly when I got a Windows message: "Do you want to copy the READ ONLY file _EnableColorOptionsGMND.package from..."
I nearly choked on my coffee. I have no idea and still don't how that file became read only. No one uses this computer but me. I went and redownloaded CEP, deleted the offending read only file and all was fine again in my game.
I know this is probably a really boring post for the majority of people here, and I apologise, but maybe someone might find it interesting... ....I find it most interesting for the fact that the file appears to have spontaneously corrupted! And I'm also thrilled that thanks to that little Windows message I didn't have to go through the painful 50% method... which would have taken me days.

You might also want to search for churches at MTS. They usually come with fantastic CC from sites that no longer exist like Religiosims. Oh and there's also a lovely vicar here: http://www.all-about-style.com/vadult_maca.html 

Are you playing with the testing cheats on?

Do you mean load faster?
Because if so the Compressorizor won't necessarily help with that...if anything it made my game load even more slowly, even though it virtually halved my downloads folder from 8+ gigs.

But if you mean your game is running slowly when you're playing it, like freezing and lagging, with slow frame rates etc, then that's another kettle of fish.
Could be your graphics card, too many high-poly objects...lots of things.

Have you removed your public Documents folder as per Carlwashere's suggestion?
Have you tried replacing the contents of the folders individually (not just replacing the entire Sims 2 folder)as per Huge Lunatic's advice?

Fantastic, Carlwashere! I'm bookmarking that thread for future reference. Stupid Google...