I have had that happen before. When that usually happens and you exit out it will wipe out your entire game. Have you checked to see if your game is wiped out? When you go to restart your game your sims picture of your houshold will be blank.
Are you using save or save as?
This problem only happend to me once and I can't remember what I was doing in the game when it happend. I googed this "Spinning" save issue. some people are posting it has somthing to do with build mode. Some are saying it has something to do with Seasons EP. Maybe somone else in here can give you more info on the cause of your problem.
I found one post that claims the "Spinning" issue maybe caused by you playing too long without saving and the game cant process all the memory to save the game
Crin who posts in this forum made a suggestion in an older post I found to try and reset game see link
http://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-3/FAQ-Troubleshooting-Steps/td-p/714
FYI - this was problem in TS2 as well. The solution then, as now, is to save often and also save using "Save As". Something about using "Save As" seems to ward off many of the problems. What I do is Save As (i.e.) New Town A, then New Town AB, then New Town ABC, etc., depending on how long I play. When I'm finished playing, I delete the older saves, rename the newest save to "New Town" and then hang on to 1 or 2 of the most recent previous saves, just in case the last save is corrupt. It is a bit of a juggle with the deleting and renaming but I've been running into enough bad saves (without CC but do have some Mods) to make it worth it.
