@power9ranger Do the packs show up if you play in another clean Sims 3 folder? I realize that doesn't help with the launcher, but it would be helpful to know.
The pack selections are stored in Internet Explorer's cache somewhere, I don't know exactly where (or what the data looks like for that matter), so in theory you could select and deselect packs without the launcher. That's far from ideal though, and it also doesn't help with installing Sims3Packs.
For the launcher issue, please try opening it again, then look for a crash dump. Click Windows key-R and copy and paste this:
%LocalAppData%\CrashDumps
When you enter, you'll see a list of .dmp files. If one of them is from the launcher, please upload it to a third-party filehosting site (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it here.
If there is no launcher .dmp file, you can enable them:
Please use a clean Sims 3 folder while generating the crash dump.
Hi. So sorry for the late response, it has been a difficult few weeks.
When I play with a completely new sims folder, all of the packs are selected and work. Once I click save and exit and then reopen that same game, now only base game is recognised. It is very frustrating as I was so close to a fix.
I tried doing all of that stuff to generate a crash dump but nothing came up. Maybe I did it wrong.
It has been very frustrating, but it is good to narrow down the issue to the sims 3 launcher.
Do you know if there have been any fixes made by EA to fix the launcher?
@power9ranger There haven't been any patches to Sims 3 in six years, so no, the launcher hasn't been fixed and likely won't be. But you might be able to get around this. In the Sims 3 user folder, there are a couple of files labeled Sims3LauncherLogFile and Sims3Logs. These can be deleted like the cache files and will regenerate the next time the game opens. Try removing them and see if your packs load in an existing folder.
It's also worth trying to play in a new admin Windows account, if you haven't already. It's easy enough to set one up for testing, and you won't need to reinstall the game.
