If I get it, it will be long after it's been out, played by others, and creators have started designing my favorite mods and cc for it.  I thought Sims 2 was a massive improvement over Sims 1, and like many others I've spent hours playing, creating, and downloading, and have no desire to walk away from that.  Not yet. 

Okay, I will do that then.  I just uninstalled everything and am getting ready to do a clean install.  I'll wait to put back the neighborhoods I created until I know that I can at least play it in Seasons.  I may hold off on installing BV for a bit, though.  

I do have everything backed up, thankfully.

Oh, and I should add that while I was able to load up Pleasantview, when I clicked on a family to try and play them I got the same issue--kept trying to load but wouldn't finish.

I've never had any issues w/the Sims before until now.  

I need to buy WinZip or get another zip program before I can download MATY's fix as my free trial expired.  Craptastical.

When you say delete the neighborhoods do you mean the Maxis ones or all of them?  And do you think that the neighborhoods I created are completely unsalvageable or do I still have hope?

I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling BV today to see if that made a difference.  Now I can get into the Maxis-made lots (at least Pleasantview) but I can't get into my created lots.  None of them work--even the ones that haven't been played since I got BV.  

Any ideas as to why the Maxis lots work but the custom ones don't?  Doesn't seem to matter if I have cc enabled or disabled, either.

No hacks--removed InSim and InTeen.  Ran Clean Install and found nothing.  I did have a ton of Tour Guides and Charleton's in my one neighborhood that I had been playing since first installing BV.  Not sure how many as I didn't count them.  Am I doomed to losing all of MY lots?

Freakin' EAxis.

After digging some more to try and find out what's going on in my game, I ran across this post at the Sims official site.  http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?&openItemID=item.189,root.1,item.43,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23&threadID=cb151505c1575dfa4fc5ab43f80dcba9&directoryID=189&startRow=1

I checked my neighborhood where I had been playing, and thus sent one of my families on vacation to all three places (one they were forced to go a second time as the shuttle screwed up and made them go on vacation again right after they returned home).  Sure enough, I have almost 800 characters in that neighborhood.  The others have around 200-400 give or take.  

So now I'm definitely wondering if this is the problem given it had been running completely fine until yesterday.