I don't know what just happened, but I had created characters in my city, living in their houses. Then I decided I wanted to move them, their whole house and all the funishings to the burbs. So, I moved the lots to the occupied house bins, and went to my town and placed them.

Everything worked fine, except in the city, my girl was engaged and pregnant by her soon to be husband and they lived seperately.

Once they moved, the pictures in their friends list was still showing the engagement ring and their friendship level, but they couldn't call each other. Then when I made her go to the park to wait for him to show up and he did, they talked as if they didn't know each other, and a new picture came up next to the first one showing them as just having met. So now there are two edwards, one I cant find and one I dont know.

What the heck happened and how do I fix it?

What happened is that you have destroyed your neighborhood. There is no way to fix it.

You should never move occupied lots to the lot bin, because it will corrupt your neighborhood. You should never install an occupied lot to your neighborhood, unless the lot has been cleaned completely, because it will corrupt your neighborhood. Doing both of these to the same neighborhood increases the corruption.

If you have a recent backup of your neighborhood, delete your corrupted neighborhood and restore from your backup now.

If you don't have a backup, then you have a choice:
1) Continue to play your corrupted neighborhood, knowing that things will just get worse and worse until your neighborhood becomes unplayable.
2) Try to salvage what you can and start a brand new neighborhood. You should be able to salvage the sims' appearances and all of your lots.
3) Give up on the neighborhood completely.

Mootilda is right. For future reference, you might want to look at this thread, which is a list of other things the game lets you do that you should never do: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=394352

Sigh - we've known about this problem so long and there is advice posted about it all over fan sites but still people are doing it. I'm sorry xmirellax - it's a bad way to find out one of the game's worst design faults. I hope you have a back up.

Hey Everyone...

Thank you for the help, and the advise. I haven't played for a long time, and just recently got back into it, so a lot of things I am learning for the first time, like this. I thought it might be a bad idea to do it when I thought of it, but I went ahead anyways because I assumed the game wouldn't allow you to do it if it wasn't supposed to be done. (without a cheat code or something anyways).

So, I don't have a backup either. Yesterday before I changed anything I remembered that I needed to read about how to do that and get it done before I installed anymore custom content, and then I got distracted and forgot all about it.

The next question is, can I just delete the characters altogether and save the houses? What about the decorating already done in the houses? What can I do save for getting rid of the whole neighborhood and all the sims in it, in other words.

Thanks again!

It sucks, but you've got to chuck the neighborhood and all the sims in it. If you package the houses with clean installer, I believe they can be saved (but someone else please confirm?)

Also, for future reference, to back up your neighborhoods, go to your documents folder. The pathway is something like My Documents/EA Games/Sims 2/. You'll want to copy the contents of the Neighborhood folder to a safe place - another hard drive is best, but another place on your computer will work if you don't have one (though you will be very sad if your computer ever dies and you lose the backups.) To back up Downloads, do the same, but copy the Downloads folder to a safe place. I often back up the entire contents of the Sims 2 folder, so everything from custom paintings to music gets backed up.

Your neighborhood can't be salvaged by deleting the sims. However, the lots can be saved. Package them as you normally would and use the Clean Installer to check for and remove any references to sims when you install them.

It that doesn't work and the furniture / decorating has already been lost when you edit the lot, then copy all of your lot package (from the Lots subfolder) into the LotCatalog folder and rename the files to match the naming convention in that folder. The furnished lots should now be available in your Lot Bin.