❀ Beach City =]

Beth - no - I purposely put my seasons on 28 days each so there is no changing of things - in fact the only thing I did was I added houses with sims in them from Py's sims and houses because they were simple, small, the sims are sweet - there was only 2-3 sims in each house and most were 2 or 4 bedrooms. I know they are all fine as I had absolutely no trouble with a single house or sim when I was testing Py's world. But that is all I did was add about 25 of these houses to the neighborhood Rflong has set up for houses and all fit perfectly and created no problems what so ever. In fact after I added them all I played about 4 hours without incident but that problem with the Vampire lounge front door and elevator. But that was all before I installed the patched - which is why I am going to do a restart with just a brand new sim family I made last night and tired to put in Tangies house - the putting in went fine - seconds into the house the dad took the toddler into the nursery and was playing with her - the mom was thinking swimming pool and headed out back, and then I saw the Uni mascot - got the pop up about the free Uni kit, the mascot rang the door bell and then the whole works froze - hadn't even had time to save or anything and it just sat there - I left it there and went and took my shower - hoping it would come out of it - I was gone 15 minutes - came to the computer and went to task manager - it said sims 3 was still running - so I went back to the screen. Tried everything I could thing of for the next 10 minutes and got no reaction - it just stayed there - finally after a total of 25 minutes of no response at all - I used task manager and quit. But I had started this game after already trying to go back to the first game that had also froze - the one I had first been playing that had all the sims in there and all I had done in that game was my sims had gotten up, took a shower and had breakfast and then went out to his garden and was harvesting his plants while I planned where to send him that day to check for problems - and had not done anything yet - but what I listed when that one froze. I managed to get that one to unfreeze after 5 minutes - paused and went looking for a source - it was 9:22 am in the world so the freeze was not from carpools, buses, or the morning rush. No clubs were open yet, and nothing that could be going on in a game at that time in the morning could have - in my mind - have created that freeze or the next one that ended up locking my whole game. All I was doing was paused and checking any area I thought might have activity that may have created a freeze - so I went to the various parks after first checking the school to make sure there had been no traffic jam there - as well as city hall - and a couple other RH's that sometimes get sims jams - saw nothing so went to the parks looking for stuck baby animals - never saw any - it just froze on nothing - this time the freeze did result in a crash but I was still on the game screen - but task manager said Sims 3 had stopped responding. I analyzed the crash log and it was the standard 'call stack' and something about illegal addressing that it always does if there is a crash - most peoples pc will go to desktop with this kind of crash - but my rarely does - my hubby has it so precision set it rarely ever crashes the pc itself. So I used task manager and got out. Shut down my pc entirely for a 10-1000 count to clean pc caches - then cold booted up - went to my game files cleaned all the caches including the World caches - in case the game got corrupted as task manager quitting often corrupts a game - and made an attempt to start up that save again - it started fine enough but seemed I was getting those little hesitations now constantly - which to me means a new start is best at this time - so I went back to the main menu and started a brand new game - made sims from my CAS and you know the rest.

Okay that all said - I spent rest of the night checking Crinricts thread and found a fair number of people are reporting these kind of freezes with the new patch - as usual though not every one is. In fact it does not even seem the majority are - but the ones that are the freezes is exactly what I experienced.

Also in that note what you describe Beth is definitely listed in bugs for the new patch with the bartender bars - but they have a work around for that - it says if you get the jumping or weird ness interacting with the bar - you need to reset the bar because apparently all content not in the base game was affected by the update and some new IP coding - some things they said will be fixed when we actually get IP and install it - so they are not issuing a patch for the patch until they see what is fixed - but the bar can be fixed by going into edit town - delete that bar, and put another one of the same bar there or if you rather save the whole bar lot to the library in edit town delete that one in game and replace it with the one you saved to the library. Some people had good luck just changing the bar while others didn't get satisfaction until the did the whole building. At least the problem you are having is a lot more common than the whole game freezing.

It seems there are a number of other issues related to the new patch also - like supposedly people are seeing dig here all over the place - I haven't seen that yet - but apparently this is some beach thing incorporated in the game for IP and this can only be fixed by installing IP. So much for people being forced to get the ep. Also the patch can change some game settings until people get IP installed - again not everyone is affected but some are - they said to just go to options and check to make sure your setting are where they should be or you want them. One thing I did see it seems that those of us who noticed all the temp files after the patch and deleted them or did anything about it are more prone to the freeze. So now I am trying to figure out what my next step is.

I know one alternative I have is one of the Guru's posted on twitter or somewhere - as this came from another poster that they could remove the new patch by uninstalling just the base game, then reinstalling it. Then they said using the superpatch - but of course this was up the first day the patch was out - and now I am fearful of that because they are pretty quick to add the newest patch to the superpatch - so don't know how that will help. Or I can what what I might do - and wait. Pete just told me he got the email this morning that my game was shipped last night. I did not use the free shipping so I will have it 10 am Tuesday morning at the latest. If after install it is all still wonky -then I will probably have to go that route. As I know that route requires reinstall of all store stuff and because of new coding means redownloading all the store stuff - I own the store. Nuff said!!! I think I will wait. But I will try one more time with yet another new sims in yet another restart sometimes today. By now what can it hurt? I also have another world to test as well - I really do not need all this craziness right now. Thank goodness I had completed the testing on Py and Elmawa's worlds before this horrid patch. I am just always baffled why some have no issues and the rest of us have all kinds. I shouldn't complain though - I have been lucky with patches up until this time. Crinrict is also suggesting reseting the Sims 3 folder even though some like me had just done a complete reinstall - as she said a reset does a few things different that a reinstall doesn't do. It all made sense - but again that means a redownload and reinstall of all my store content because of all the new recoding. So I think I might just wait. There seems to be enough of you guys here able to keep going I won't be missed anyway.