The game can't/doesn't want to write cache

@bi0hzrd  Does it make a difference whether you play in fullscreen or windowed mode?  I tested in windowed because I was multi-tasking, and I wouldn't have expected that to make any difference, and the game was also running at a much lower resolution than what my laptop screen supports.  That's higher than 1080p, so I could test that too, although I generally play in fullscreen mode at 2560x1440 and don't see this issue.

Did this problem happen before you used the GPU add-on tool, and does it still happen if you repair the game?  Doing so would revert your .sgr files, including making your GPU unrecognized again, but that's not a major problem and shouldn't have anything to do with this specific issue.

The problem with reloading a town is a bit unclear to me.  I think you're saying that loading times are longer if a few hours have passed, but is there anything else different, for example do the WorldCache files disappear again?  That's one reason an initial loading time would be longer than subsequent ones; the other I can think of is that in a new save at least, the game needs to place expansion lots.  But that wouldn't be an issue if you're loading an existing save, only a new one.

For the portraits, I see the winking face too sometimes, both with active and inactive sims.  I've never really looked into it but have thought that it had to do with the sims' current moods, as the game is calculating them.  Or maybe it has to do with some other status, like whether they're being simulated at the moment.  But since this has followed me through several computers and hasn't seemed to be correlated to any other issues, I've never worried about it.