Background: I'm running The Sims 3, with most of the EPs (except University Life and Into the Future) and no SPs, on Win 7 Professional (3.9 GB RAM, 200 GB hard drive space) on a VM running under VMWare Player 6 on Linux Mint 17 xfce (8 GB RAM, 1 TB hard drive space).

Problem: A few days ago my game crashed, and since I was running in fullscreen and the VM was not responding to Ctrl+Alt+Del I was forced to restart the entire computer. Since then, when I have tried to play The Sims, the game loads fine but any time a Sim goes indoors there are strange red lines streaming directly upwards from that Sim, visible both in normal (? not sure what to call it) view and map view. It looks like this:

I tried deleting cache files, removing all CC and store content and deleting cache files again, and renaming the Sims 3 folder in My Documents. Nothing has worked. This affects all games I try it in and all active households (I haven't bothered to test if it affects Sims in the active household since my testing method has just been to start a new game in Sunset Valley, choose a random household, and send someone inside the house). I have also restarted both the guest and host multiple times. What are my options here?

Do you have a laptop or a desktop computer? Are all of your drivers up to date? Your video card might be insufficient for running the game or be damaged.

Laptop computer, GeForce GT 745M, all drivers up to date. I had device driver problems due to the host OS being poorly configured when I initially tried to run the game, but I fixed it and was able to run the game with no graphics problems until this happened. The computer is less than a month old.

EDIT: I should mention that other games requiring 3D acceleration also run fine (e.g, Morrowind, Oblivion) and have continued to run fine after the system crash. So I am somewhat skeptical that this is a driver issue.

EDIT 2: Uninstalled and reinstalled the game. Works (i.e., no red lines or other major weirdness) w/o patches or EPs. Currently waiting for the patch to download so I can try it with patches; concurrently waiting for EPs to download from Origin.

EDIT 3: Installing the patch broke it again. Still no EPs installed.

EDIT 4: Fixed (at least for now) by uninstalling and reinstalling Nvidia device drivers on the Linux host. Sorry for doubting you when you said it was a device driver issue, bluegirl45.