New Strange Problem

[earthshoes]

Yesterday, while in the middle of doing something else, I received a message from Nortons (?) alerting me to the fact that some program had requested permission to change a file association in Sims (EA Games) to some system file. Since I hadn't initiated any changes, I said not to.

This morning when I loaded sims, it brought up a neighborhood that I thought I'd deleted during the last install. I did a system restore and everything ran fine.

However, now Nortons won't load completely?

Any thoughts?

[simsample]

Do you mean that Norton antivirus is not running correctly? If you have performed a system restore, this means that you could also have restored any viruses or malware that you had on your system. I would recommend that you try to uninstall Norton and then reinstall it to make it work; and then to update the virus definitions and perform a full scan. If you cannot make Norton work then you could download other virus and malware scanners for free; I would recommend AVG, spybot S&D and Ad-Aware among others- you can find them easily if you search on Google.

[earthshoes]

Hi Simsample.

I've run scans (trend housecall is good for this) and only found adware. I've reinstalled Nortons twice now. I've conferred with a couple of other computer people and they tell me that Nortons 2004 (which I've been using) is simply a buggy piece of software and that the updates haven't fixed it. There's a long unsim-related story here so I'll save you the details. I grabbed Nortons of my shelf a month ago when my Trend Micro subscription ran out.

AVG is great software, but is not a firewall. I have Ad-aware, spybot, Microsoft Anti-spyware, and spyguard.

I think we have Microsoft to thank for part of this. They have a two fold hot fix/update that I installed this morning. Sigh. It's a shame Sims won't run on Linux . . .

[simsample]

I've always found that Norton makes your system very slow- I work in a school which has 500+ computers and we gave up with Norton! I guess that somehow your deleted files must have got restored, and that the Norton firewall was alerting you to this. If you activate the Tea timer and SD timers on Spybot you should have the same protection without the problems that Norton has brought you.

[earthshoes]

Hi Simsample and thanks for replying. I uninstalled Nortons, installed AVG and Kerio.

Unfortunately, the old problem is back. The sims I created yesterday before I uninstalled Nortons have vanished. I'm going to go try again and see if the problem is related to to the changes. I hope so.

**sigh**
This is getting very, very old.

[earthshoes]

Another Sim bites the dust.

I don't want to start over again . . . again. The last time I did this, I tried saving my games and my neighborhood folders and it didn't work. I wound up having to do a complete reinstall.

This means that for whatever reason it's not saving new Sims (again). The ones I created before are all there, but three of them are pregnant and I don't want them to have the baby then have the baby disapear.

I guess I get to choose between system vulerabilities and playing sims.



arg.

[simsample]

Hmmmm..... is your documents folder read only by any chance? Take a look at these threads:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=108285&page=2&pp=25
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=103880

[earthshoes]

Yes. In fact, you can see that I contributed heavily to the conversation and Jax, bless him/her, patiently walked me through tons of work arounds, command prompt line changes and so on. It reverted to read only every time. In the end, I gave up and reinstalled--wiping out everything I'd done so far--just as a couple of other contributers to the thread did.

Yes, my EA file is read only, but it was after the reinstall and I've been able to save until yesterday. The fact of the matter is, "My Documents" "My Pictures" and "My Music" are all also marked as "Read Only" and I make changes to them on a regular basis by adding pics and music and so on. I don't think "Read Only" is the issue in this case.

I have wondered if it's possible for my downloads folder to be too full and since clean install crashes every time I attempt to scan it--that is beginning to make sense. If this is the case, then I should be able to delete the files I'm not using and see if this is the issue. If it is, I'll let you know.

thanks for your help
mary

[simsample]

Oops, sorry Mary! But, I don't think the contents of your downloads folder or the quantity will have any bearing on this... the fact that clean installer crashes probably points to a particular file being corrupted. But the issue of your documents being read only would definitely prevent you from saving; if the permission was applied to subfolders it would mean that you couldn't add files to the folder... the fact that you can add music to your my music folder shows that you must have write permissions to that, as folder permissions are quite a lot more extensive than the user interface initially allows you to see. This could explain some of your problems with Norton; if you are using 'Go Back' (I think that's what the Norton restore utility is called) and also a virus vault, then read only files can cause glitches.

[earthshoes]

'Lo again. Quick update for anyone who might run into this again:

Well, for whatever reason--here's the fix as it worked this time. I did clean out my downloads folder (let Sim clean installer run and re-run, deleted empty packages and so on), saved the contents of the folder to a folder on my desktop. Saved the contents of my neighborhood folder (not the neighborhood folder itself, just the stuff inside) and did a thorough uninstall, wiping out all traces of the program-including what I could find in my registry. I had to manually delete a fair amount of Nightlife for some reason. I then did a complete reinstall and put back my neighborhood as I'd saved it (this didn't work last time, don't know why it did this time around). I only have theories and they involve gremlins--highly technical I know. I've added two sims to the neighborhood and they were still there this morning when I pulled the game back up.

I've shut off windows update for lack of a better idea, installed AVG and Kerio. If this happens again, I guess I'll just do what I just did again.

[simsample]

Thanks for the information, please let us know if it happens again as it would be nice to be able to figure out why! Happy Simming!

[earthshoes]

Funny you should ask . . . After being on and off the game all afternoon--a Sim disappeared.

This time I had just downloaded a couple of favorite custom houses that I've used before (ah-hah!). I put the house in the neighborhood and then clicked on a family screen. The sim I'd created was in the family screen with the female maxis character, but when I entered the lot all traces of him were gone--including her memory of him. Oddly, he was there first and I'd moved her in afterwards. I'd very much like to remove the houses at this point, but I have no idea where to look.

Anyway, I don't know if it's how the files are being installed or the houses themselves at this point.

hmmm . . .

[earthshoes]

I give up. I am not a gamer--just a writer, teacher and mother who spends her off-time puttering on the computer. This should have been a good match for me.

The babies who were born yesterday are gone (and there's no memory of them, which really bothers me and probably means I need some sort of therapy). The adult sims I placed today are gone. Love--gone--friendships--gone . . .

There is little point in playing a game that I have to reinstall every two days--especially considering the amount of time it takes to: install it (total eight discs on CD), load it, run it, play it, run fixes, uninstall, reinstall etc. The amount of time that goes into creating relationships, building houses . . . good grief . . .

Never mind. Hope everyone else has better luck with it. As for me, I'm using my discs as coasters (Or frisbees for my German Shepherd).

[simsample]

In this case I think that the read-only issue is the cause.... it is worth going into safe mode and enabling the permissions again, as I suggested on the other thread. The Sims2 will not be able to write savegames if it does not have the correct permissions, so I believe that this is a Windoze issue, and that you may find that other games will not save correctly, either.
Can you try one more thing.... right click on your 'my documents' folder. Do you have a 'security' tab there? If so, can you click on it and tell me what rights your username has? (Forgive me if you don't have this on your computer... it's difficult to remember exactly what appears on different versions of Windows!)

[earthshoes]

If it's read only, why will it save to the correct file for a few days and then suddenly quit?

Have you heard of NPC issues? I ran across a discussion on Various Sims about the problems caused by moving NPCs in and/or marrying them. I've done this a couple of times now. It seems to generate an inordinate number of files (I have something like 342 character files in my characters folder and I'm only playing with about a dozen at the most) . I had just moved an NPC into a house when my newest problems began. I hadn't even considered it because I'd also just installed a custom house.

I will try changing it in safe mode again. (I've got nothing to lose, right?) And while I don't have a securities tab in Win XP, I do have administrative rights in so far as the Home version allows.

[simsample]

342 is okay- it's when the number gets above 800 that you get problems. What I'm thinking is this- your Documents folder definitely shouldn't be read only, and as you cannot seem to fix that I would assume that this is the reason for your saving problems. I've moved NPCs in before with no problems, although I know that this was an issue pre-patch.

[happy_frog]

i have no idea. sorry.

[earthshoes]

I entered windows in safe mode. I think I gave everybody and his brother (and their other brother Darryl) permission to access files by way of the security tab (which does exist in Safe Mode). I then booted normally and the file still reads as "read only". I attempted to turn it off. No dice.

I went to the neighborhood. The pics of the Sims I created are in the family screen, but they are gone from the house. The Sim's memory (an NPC) has "get engaged to subject" etc.

Sigh. Thanks for trying. According to the techie sites, microsoft's command line work arounds for this don't seem to work for most. I'm sure there's a fix, but it's probably buried deeper than that. I may research this further because I'd like to know.

I redownloaded SimPe and discovered that the default file to save games is C: Program files\EA Games. I changed it there, though I doubt it has any bearing on game play. Interesting though. It's a shame that Maxis doesn't give us a choice as to where we save our games.

It looks like the only way for some of us to play sims is to dedicate a machine to it and run it all the time.

Still searching . . .