@Playgirl3 So it sounds like your particular save is corrupted, not that your game isn't working overall. There's not much you can do here, unfortunately. But adding a few mods is worth a shot, if you're interested. I'd suggest NRaas ErrorTrap, Overwatch, and MasterController only, not anything else, at least for now. More information is here:
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-3-Common-Game-Fixing-Mods-Hero-Approved/td-p/9836847
Let me know whether this works.
One other thing you can try is to replace some of the files within the affected save. Create a new save in the same world, play it for a few minutes, save, and quit. You don't need to spend any real time on it, just enough to get into live mode and have the game clock running. Inside the Saves folder, open the folder for your new save, and delete the .nhd file. Then copy over the .nhd file from your affected save and see whether this new save loads. The name and thumbnail will still correspond to the new save, but the .nhd file is the important part, so you'd be loading your old save minus some extraneous data.
You can try this with whatever backups you have, the older the better since saves only get more corrupt as time goes on. I would also strongly recommend leaving the mods in place for the initial test, although you can remove them to test again another time if you want.
Finally, make sure to delete the fache files each time you quit the game, at leat while troubleshooting. For reference, they are:
- CASPartCache.package
- compositorCache.package
- scriptCache.package
- simCompositorCache.package
- socialCache.package
