crinrict,
I was wary of updating to the 1.50 patch because I have TONS of mods and CC, but I had no choice because of Aurora Skies and University Life which I pre-ordered. However, I followed ALL of your instructions to the letter and did the update after I made sure that must have mods had also been updated to 1.50 and replaced the old ones with the new after moving them out of the documents folders in EA. It went great, without a single hitch...until I went to put my updated mods back in. Then it crashed. So, I removed the mods, and did the 50/50 of putting them back in. Sure enough, it was a single mod (not one of the big names) that didn't match the updates) relaunched the game without that md and it ran great, until I got to CAS and all my male Sims were FAT!!! Turned out I forgot to transfer a waist slider when doing the 50/50. Oops! Now, everything is working as it should, and I haven't found any bugs so far, though I've only been playing a few hours. I'm about to try the travel in WA in a little bit to see if there is anything there that people have been having issues with.
The result so far is this:
Even if you have lots of Mods/Hacks or CC, if you keep everything organized in their folders and follow crinrict's instructions on how to do updates properly, the game will work. Using crinrict's guide and being patient, it only took me about an hour to get everything done.
Thank you crinrict!!!