Hi sorry for taking a while to respond--work got busy and I got sick ☹️ Anyway, I found the time to try it out and here's what happened.
I started with a new new blank game after backing everything up. Then I moved everything in the saves folder back one by one. Only the "short" files (like Slot_00000002.save vs Slot_00000002.save.ver0) seemed to contain the save games. I isolated the bad and good versions in separate folders to keep track of them, because every time I found a "bad" one it would contaminate my good ones and I'd have to make a new blank game. By contaminate I mean that even if I removed the bad one and kept a good one in there, the next time I opened TS4 the good one would be bad. After I finally finished sorting through everything, I had a good copy of my legacy game but had no good copy of my other game. In other words, the first one (the one that kept getting the error 22 message) had no houses and all the lot values were reset to the land value only.
I decided I could live with this loss because I realised that I could build new houses on these vacant lots and they would be saved with no problems. I had no original houses in that game, so no problem. I built a new house over three separate sessions and each time I opened TS4 everything was fine so I assumed it was all solved. I moved a family in to this house and then played it for a bit and then I played my legacy for a bit. Today when I went back to check on it, the second game (non-legacy) was broken again! I got the error message 22 and it redirected to my legacy game like before. When I went in to the legacy game directly, it was all fine. So I backed it up and sorted through the save files again, still separating the good and the bad. I think that there's something wrong with that second game and same thing. Tried it with a new blank game and just my legacy and same thing. I think that the act of playing the game corrupts it in some way so that the save files can't be read even though the data is still there. Any suggestions so I don't have to manually change all the files over every time I want to play?
