SimPE can't seem to read my character files, and I'm not sure why.

Until very recently it worked ok, with a few missing portraits here and there, but now all of my Sims have no portrait. It would only be annoying if not for SimSurgery being broken because of it, too.

I can still see a few things like a Sims personality or age group, and I can run the HoodChecker on my neighborhoods fine, so I don't get why SimPE can't see the appearance of my Sims. Even with a brand new neighborhood and Sims its still potato city.

At the moment, SimSurgery is all I really need from SimPE right now, so if anyone could help me figure out how to get rid of all these taters I'd really appreciate it!

Usually, changing a sim's appearance with the mirror ingame seems to do the trick, but all potatoes is a new one for me.

Delete the NeighborhoodManager.package in \Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods.

Make a new folder called backup in \Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Thumbnails and place the CASThumbnails.package in it and then go into every house with sims in it and click on every sim then restart your game and exit then try SimPE.

It didn't work.
I'm not sure what "click on every sim" means so I tried every possible interpretation.

I think it's "Have every sim active once". Since you've deleted the old thumbnails file, that would create new thumbnails and should unpotato your sims.

That's what I assumed it was for, but I wasn't sure since the instructions were vague and I wasn't told why. In any case I did it and nothing was fixed.

If something like that was the problem though, making a new neighborhood would fix things, wouldn't it? Since all the thumbnails would be new. But that's never helped me, either.

It's really worrisome that I can't use SimSurgery until this gets fixed, but for the time being it'd be ok if I knew of another way to extract a sim appearance from the game.

Yes Ovenhole is correct in that it will make each sim active after a restart of the game with the new thumbnails file.

Have you tried the stand alone SimPE that does not need to be installed? http://downloads.sourceforge.net/simpe/SimPe_0_72_01.7z
Unzip it and just click on the SimPE icon inside of the folder and it will run.

That fixed it!

I wish I knew why it stopped working in the first place, but this seems like reliable fix if it happens again.

Thanks for the help again, marka93!