I'm an artist (painter) and I'd like to use some of my painted images as paintings in Sims 3 houses I've made.  What utility is best suited to creating buyable artwork for Sims 3? Where can I get it?

I recently installed the newest patch for Sims 3.  Everything seems to work fine EXCEPT, I can no longer create new Sims because they must have traits and lifetime ambitions, neither of which are accessible now.  Also, I can no longer play existing families.  The loading starts, but then stops and the game locks up every time I try to select a family to play.  I can, however, access unoccupied houses and lots.  I've checked and find no reference to either of these problems.  The same thing happened when I installed World Adventure (which updated my game).  So I uninstalled everything and reinstalled the base game (no patches) and it worked fine.  I've got a lot of custom content but it seems to have no effect on either of these problems.

I'm running XP with an Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT video card with one gig of memory.  I have 4 Gb of RAM.  Any help anyone can supply would be appreciated

I'm not sure this is Pets related but the problem seems to have arisen around the time I installed Pets.  (I've got all the other EPs too).  Anyway, I can now no longer install Sims2 Pack lots.  I've researched this problem both here and MTS2 and found others have encountered it but none of the solutions offered seem to work for me.  It's been suggested that I use MTS's Clean Pack Installer but that offered up an error message involving not being able to find a file called "localpackages.txt."  The TS2 installer says I'm missing expansion pack files (it'd be nice if it said which ones).  Compared to some of the other problems I've been reading about from Pets users, this is relatively minor, but solving it would allow me to do some things with my neighborhoods I've not been able to do recently.  Let me know if you need more details.  Anyone who can help I'd greatly appreciate it.  You may PM me if you'd like.

Thanks-- Jay61