I've attempted to install Open For Business on many occasions over the past 7 years on this PC (my old one ran it without a hitch), and no matter what, it never works. My original disk gave me an error, then a different copy gave me the same error, so now I've resorted to downloading it. This method has gotten me quite a bit further than using a disk--the installation actually finished without any error messages--but the catch now is that the game doesn't recognize it. I currently access the game via my Apartment Life disk, as it's the most recent one on this device. It may be worth noting that OFB is the only expansion I've downloaded--everything else has been installed via disk (but not in chronological order).

As you can see, Open For Business seems to have found its way into the proper location, but the launcher fails to notice that it's been installed.





If I select the OFB expansion link and choose Run as Administrator, it clearly wants to start up, but even if I had this one on disk, it isn't the most recent one that's been installed, so it would likely not open that way anyway.



When I open the Sims 2 (via Apartment Life), nothing has changed within the game in any capacity. The OFB icons are still grayed out as though the game still needs to be installed.

What may have gone wrong during the installation process, and why is my game not recognizing its own expansion? More importantly, what steps can I take to get my favorite expansion working again after all these years?

If you don't have M&G then you should be starting the game by apartment life. You never select OFB and try and run it.

So next it appears you are trying to use the launcher, we don't use that anymore, not for years. We run the game from the exe as a desktop shortcut and nearly all of us use the 4 gb patch and run the game from that. This includes those of us on windows 7.

However, if you are loading up the game and no OFB items are showing then you have more issues. The fact it has given you issues before indicates it may never have fully uninstalled from the first failed install. There may have been one or more leftover files still on your pc probably in the registry keys and when you try to install again those left over files are messing it up. It may need to be cleaned out of all sims 2 files first.

I used these examples to show that the game was installed but not recognized. I do use the desktop shortcut to actually open and run the game (but I attempted these other approaches earlier to see if OFB would be recognized through an alternate method).

As for previous installation attempts, I did find this in a completely different folder from when I tried to copy the files manually from the disk years ago. I must have saved it in this location thinking I would use it in the future, but it turned out to be useless.



Opening the uninstaller does not do anything even if I Run as Administrator (though it did respond once to try to reinstall it with different settings; now I cannot duplicate this screen), so I'm not sure if anything is partially installed or it's just taking up space.
Is this old backup folder causing some sort of hindrance to the installation/recognition process? And is there anything I should do with it before tossing it into the Recycle Bin?

Have you been launching the game through Apartment Life? Even if Open for Business is your recent EP, you still have to launch the game from the most recently released EP/SP, in your case, this would be Apartment Life. Keep the Apartment Life disc in and launch from that.

Edit: Ah, there's no icon in the launcher. See if you can try to run the install process again, if the PC thinks that it's installed, then backup up your install files, try deleting the OFB folder and try to run the install again. This would be a last resort, though.

yes, I am saying if you have even one file stuck in the registry keys from a previous install it will give you issues with any future install. One such issue- opening the uninstaller does nothing. I had the same issue with registry keys and went through them manually with a tech friend and cleaned them all out.

A backup folder is fine, it is stuck files in the registry key most likely. https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-registry-key-2625999

The registry is showing some anomalies that could be behind why the game and this expansion will not coexist. What to do about them is a different story entirely, of course.

In every folder under the Wow6432Node depicting an expansion that I've successfully installed, the REG_DWORD value is 0x00000001 (1) and the language is English US.



In the Open For Business folder, however, the value jumps up to 0x00000013 (19). This seems like a red flag. Why would it have such a drastically different value?



(English UK is the default language for this one, unlike all the others; no idea if that can affect compatibility/readability)

If this is what's causing the expansion to be overlooked by the game, what would the next step be in this process?

Is your Open for Business a PAL copy or an NTSC copy? Or does that not make a difference when it comes to PC games?