They are certainly suspect. Usually, they are not needed and can be scrapped, especially if they are empty. They have a formidable reputation for causing problems. You have my sympathy, I spent 5 hours last night laboriously tracking down a bug that came in via a download, something someone forgot to remove, no doubt. Anyway, you should be able to just delete those and then see if they were the cause of the problem. I do have several that are legit. If you have clean installer, run it against the downloads folder and it will identify duplicates (pink), hacks (red), and empty packages. If you don't have it you can find it at
http://sims2pack.modthesims2.com/ . The ones that were causing me grief were test_engines and test_game_edition_flags. It was not serious in my case, it just went into a loop showing owner name on any sink the cursor happened to pass over. Good luck. Also, go the the EA\SIMS2 folder in my documents and delete the groups.cache and accessories.cache files, they get corrupted sometimes causing the game to crash or not load. The game will rebuild them when you restart it. It is a good idea to do this after every download session, just to keep them clean.
