BV New Sims disappearing on restart

Last night, my long-running BV neighborhood started losing newly created sims. I could create one, move it in to an existing house, play with it extensively, and save without problems. But after I exited and re-started the game, the new sim had vanished from the household, not even an icon. This happened several times, and even sims I left in the sim bin likewise disappeaered. All attempts to locate the sim in the neighborhood proved useless; even SimPE could not find the sim. Other sims still had the memories of the missing sim, but the name was corrupted to something with non-ascii characters.

However, in the neighborhood Characters/ folder, I found oddness: packages with names like N003_User0308.package, and a matching N003_User0308.1.package. The '.1.package' was newer and larger; the 'original' was like 12KB, while the .1.package was >200KB. Opening them with SimPE showed that they somehow contained my missing sims, but I couldn't fire out how to see any stats, put them in the neighborhood, etc.

I hadn't installed any new hacks recently, but I removed all my custome content anyway, and the problem still persisted. I removed my entire EA Games directory and let the game recreate a new one; the problem still occurred. Suspected that perhaps my recent install of the BV patch 2 might be the cause, I uninstalled BV completely, and reinstalled it without any patches at all; the problem still occurred.

Evantually, I found that I could re-create the problem by starting the game in a totally clean user directory, creating a new family using CAS, leaving it in the sim bin, then exiting and restarting. The newly created sim(s) would be gone from the game, though their files still existed in the neighborhood's Characters/ folder.

Playing around a bit, I found that the problem did *not* occur when I uninstalled BV and created sims in Seasons, and such Seasons-created sims would survive when I re-installed BV. But even a spanking new installed of BV and a spanking new user directory had the problem.

Finally, I decided to try renaming on of those 'User_0308.1.package' files to just 'User_0308.package', and voila! The missing Sim reappeared in my Sims Bin! It seems that somehow the game is creating the '.1' files as temps, and then failing to move them to the proper name on save/exit.

I've been hacking on this all night, and have not yet experimented to see if doing such things to Sims in households will restore the households. Likewise, I have not uninstalled and reinstalled *all* my Sims games to see if it fixes the problem (Though I did do a reinstall of both Seasons and BV, and it still happened).

I could not find any mention of this problem on various Sims 2 sites, though I did find some other cases of sims vanishing similarly, though in totally different circimstances. My suspicion is that this problem is somehow related to BV patch 2, though I fail to understand how removing and reinstalling BV would fail to fix it, or that other patch 2 users could have failed to notice it.

So, my questions are: has anyone else seen this problem? Does anyone have any idea what the cause might be? Any suggestions on how to fix it?

FYI, I'm running Windows Vista on a dual core Dell XPS 410 with a nVidia GForce 8600 card, which has proved otherwise stable. My filesystem is far from full, has been recently defragged, and has otherwise not been giving me any problems. I have all TS2 expansion packs, and the FFS and GLS stuff packs. I am not running a cracked game, and have had no obvious problems with SecuRom (though as that stays on my computer even after uninstalling BV, I'm starting to suspect it). I am posting this message on several different sites, not just this one.

I would appreciate any help that anyone can provide. Thank you in advance.

GalenZ