@darkdreaIt's never necessary to login, either at the launcher or the Main Menu, to play TS3. Your saved games are stored on your computer, not online, and the only features you'd be missing are the chance to earn achievement badges and the in-game shopping experience. I don't care for either of these, so I almost exclusively play offline. Logging in also uses RAM that the game could benefit from keeping to itself, so it's better to stay offline if you're experiencing crashes or lag.
Having said all that, if you want to try logging in again, there are a couple of other steps you can take. When you cleared IE's cache, did you also uncheck the box to preserve data for favorites? If not, the browser could have preserved your login info instead of flushing it. Also, what happens if you don't login at the launcher but only try at the Main Menu? The launcher login is irrelevant unless you're about to upload content to the exchange.
The other thing you can do is drag your entire TS3 game folder out of Documents and onto your desktop. When you launch the game again, a clean folder will spawn with no content. There's a file in the old folder that contains your login info (in Downloads), so perhaps getting that out of the way would solve the problem. But a completely clean folder might also help your in-game issues (the ones that caused you to want to reset), as the deleting cache files from your game folder is a good troubleshooting step, and good practice in general. Once you've loaded a new save, you can quit without saving and then move your existing saves and other content from your old game folder into your new one.
@darkdrea Just to be clear, you can use the store, and upload items to the exchange, while you're not actively playing. In fact, buying from the store is more reliable when you do it through the store's website (store.thesims3.com) rather than in-game. The item(s) will download into your launcher, and then you can install them from there. The same principle applies to downloading through the exchange. I believe you can also upload with only the launcher open, but in truth I've never uploaded anything, so I haven't seen how it's suppose to work.
It sounds like you're on patch 1.69 and therefore have an Origin-controlled install. If some of your packs aren't showing in the launcher, or aren't checked off when you press play, you may not be able to load saved games that used those packs. This is true whether or not you're logged into the launcher. It's occasionally necessary to go through the list of packs and uncheck and recheck all of them, as sometimes the launcher doesn't "remember" your previous selection.
