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I keep loosing my original swing set and other original Sims 2 items in the inventory.  They seem to be hidden in the inventory.  They show up on lots but I can't find them to choose them.  I have uninstalled and reinstalled a few times.  The files are there until I enable my downloaded items into my inventory, then they are hidden.  Any suggestions?

You probably have a cc object using swing set coding in your download folder.  Remove that and your swing set will be back.

How do I do that?  I don't really understand what you mean.

Do you know what a swing set code is?  I have no clue or do you know how to find one so I will not delete the wrong thing?

lacey - each item in the game has a unique identifier number (some have more than one number since these use more than one square of the terrain) - this is called a GUID.

Some items are designed to replace Maxis objects, these are called "default replacements", they use GUIDs of Maxis objects on purpose and replace in game things.

Other items are made by inexperienced custom content creators and they do not assign new, unique numbers to their items, this leads to an accidental replacement of Maxis items.

Also, there is a known problem with the game's content catalogue.  For whatever reason, it will randomly stop showing things.  This problem is made worse by Stuff Packs -- Family Fun Stuff even requires a patch to prevent a catastrophic version of this bug from affecting clothing.  And one of the EPs -- I don't remember which one -- would allow you to delete Maxis content from the game resulting in a corrupted game install, this too required a patch to correct.

Lastly, there is the matter of Downloads.  Each computer has its own personality here.  After you add some unspecified number of items to the game's downloads folder, things start going wrong.  Again, this is a version of the known content catalogue bug.

My advice is to delete your thumbnails and caches:

   Accessory.acache
Groups.cache
ContentRegistry
cigen.package

from

   (My) Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2

and

   BuildModeThumbnails.package
CANHObjectsThumbnails.package
CASThumbnails.package
DesignModeThumbnails.package
ObjectThumbnails.package

from:

   (My) Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails

doing this is safe and will force the game to rebuild the content catalogue from scratch.

Make sure to look for the swings in both possible locations:

By Room: Outdoors: Miscellaneous
By Funtion: Miscellaneous: Miscellaneous

If the swings are still absent, then you will probably end up doing a number of rather tedious things trying to correct the problem, things like scanning folders with Delphy's Downloads Organizer to look for replacements or scanning the downloads folder with SimPE using the advaced GUID search function.  Or even uninstalling and re-installing everything and starting over.

When things go wrong with The Sims 2, they hardly ever go wrong in a minor, easy to fix way

Thank you. I will try all of these.  One thing I noticed was that when I removed all the downloads, the swing reappeared.

Then it is clear one of the files you have in your downloads folder is replacing the swing set.

To isolate it, adds small quantity of cc back in your game, start the game and check if the swingset is there.  If not, the culprit is among the cc you added.  Keep doing that until you find the file doing that.

Okay.  I only have 12 cc files.  I am assuming that mean the files that start with cc, e.g., ccf80c2c82260....

CC is the abbreviation of custom creation.  It does not have to do with the spelling of the file, it can be any file you have in your downloads folder that is causing the disappearance of your swing set.

WOW!!!  I have thousands of files.  This may take a while.  Thank you.

I guess I'll do it line by line