I've had a whole slew of problems with this new patch. First when I tried to run the patch, it told me that my GtCore4.dll file was missing/corrupt and quit the download. I got that fixed by reinstalling my eadm, and then the patch seemed to install fine. When I went to open the launcher, however, I got the 'invalid base game' message like many other people seem to be. It turned out that the patch had only updated HELS, not the base game and WA (I do not have AMB yet), so I manually installed the patch for each of these and now the launcher works and the game loads (albeit at a snail's pace). I've moved all my CC and mods to the new location, and the game gives me the notification of their presence just as it should. However, when I actually get into the game, I cannot select other sims in my household of seven. The active sim is the mother, and she can interact with the others (except for her husband, with whom there are no possible interactions). Also, one of her triplet babies has vanished, despite being listed as on the lot when I cursor over it in Map View. Her husband, however, is not shown as present from this view when I can clearly see him seated at the kitchen table.
I cannot make other sims in the household active, as there are no icons to select on the left side of the screen. The control panel is there, though there is no image of the active sim in it.
I've attached a screenshot showing the issue with the icons. In it, there are no moodlets, either, though those do show up after a bit in game.
Please and thanks for all your help! I'm really at a loss!

Remove all custom content, delete you cache files and test again.

Just tried it, and, aside from the removal of CC making the sims look messed up, nothing changed.

Try starting a new game and see if game is OK then. A similar thing happened to me, I started a new game and everything was fine. I don't think I can use any of my pre-Ambitions save games, I don't know why this happened.

This happened to me also after I tried to age up my baby, using the cheat rather than the cake. Nothing happened after the message saying it was his birthday. Then when I loaded the game up again this happened.

Tried using resetsim and the adult Sims became selectable, but my teenager and toddler were not. I tried moving the baby out to the clipboard and deleting him, but it kept getting stuck on processing. Though I was able to move out the rest of the family, save them to the library, and start a new game with them. All of their data is pretty much the same other than relationships not within the household.

Yea I have a similar issue. Created a family, spent hours developing a house for them. Went to play them, and I can't. I can click on things around them, (like I can make my sims do what I want with objects) but I can't make them click on each other, or on themselves. Very frustrating.

Yeah, it is frustrating. I'm starting to think I might not be able to recover my game. I'm going to check some of my brother's saves to see if they have the same issue. The other thing is, I backed up all my saves right before installing the patch. I'll see if restoring them makes any difference.

So I've I checked it out some more. It appears that only the two most recently played games are affected, which leads me to think that perhaps only my games saved after a certain point in time are in jeopardy. Restoring back up files was no help at all, but new games seem to work just fine. I was able to save the affected households to the bin, so though a lot of the family tree is lost, I can still start a new game with them. So I guess that's alright, but fingers crossed for a patch that'll fix this soon.

I did as werismyki said, and it worked. I just removed all custom content and renamed my Sims 3 folder to Sims3Backups so that a new one would create when I loaded the game (yet I wouldn't lose the info in the old one) Loaded the game, created my sims, moved them into a house. Then when I was sure I could activate them/click on them, I closed the game and slowly added my custom content back in (the proper folder...it was still in the C:drive EA folder...) and it works fine now!

Thanks!

I had this similar problem except I didn't have the sim panel for needs and such. Ultimately, I had to reinstall everything. I still have the problem of the game randomly crashing when I save at times but that was the end result.