DeadBattery11 If you have Mods installed, please test this out in a clean user folder. Go to Documents\EA Games and move The Sims 2 Legacy folder to your desktop to generate a clean one when you launch the game again. If it keeps happening, enable testing cheats (open the cheat console by pressing CTRL-Shift-C and entering boolProp testingCheatsEnabled true) and see if any error messages pop up when you try to do the interactions you mentioned. If they do, go to Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 Legacy and add the Logs folder into a ZIP file, then attach it to your reply here.
I generated a clean Sims 2 + clean save with no mods and the novel glitch was fixed! The food glitch was too for a bit... then it started up again and popping up error messages when Pascal + Lazlo went to cook or eat. Lazlo was still not making new memories. I also couldn't give Lazlo a secondary aspiration as it would glitch away his primary (that happened with my modded save too but I thought it was my doing and didn't list it in the first post) and errors kept popping up to reset him until I used the ReNuYuSenso Orb on him to fix his aspiration.
Couldn't get the zip to upload directly, so it is a google drive link, hope that is okay!
Log Zip link
