I used batch fix to go through all of my files and fix them. Those that no longer work in my game, I'd rather not want. I have a lot of blue downloads in my folders (especially the countertops) that are custom objects, but there is no asterisk on their thumbnail, so I can't delete them. I can't tell which ones are blue or not from Clean Installer. Does anyone know how I can delete these from within the game?

this happens to me sometimes but it goes away when I reload the game.

There was a hack to remove the asterisk in the thumbnail of the custom download. I think it's somewhere in here... I have to search.

AHA! I found it:

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...hlight=asterisk

Have you removed your hacks? (They show up as red in Clean Installer)

I don't want to remove the asterisk, I want to delete the items that don't have one.

I also doubt this issue is caused by hacks, as I haven't seen anyone mention this problem, but I'll test it out if I can't come up with some better solutions.

Do you have items that have asterisks and some that don't?

Try this: Delete all the thumbnail files in the Thumbnails folder. Also delete the groups.cache and cigen.cache file in your Downloads folder. Don't worry, these files will get created when you launch your game again.

As far as I know, you can not delete the items w/o asterisks as they are official maxis items. You will have to touch a game file (in Program Files/EA Games). I highly recommend that you do not do that.

This may not be what is happening in your case, but....

After fixing my objects, I found I had a lot of blue duplicates. And when I deleted ONE of these duplicates, the OTHER one of the duplicate pair still showed blue - and had no asterisk.

However, when I closed that object selection and then reopened it, the remaining (ex-) duplicate was no longer blue, and now had an asterisk again.

This worked most efficiently when sorting the objects using the design tool; putting a Maxis version down on the lot, then using the design tool to test for blue items and deleting through there, then closing and reopening the design tool to reactivate the items whose asterisks had disappeared in the process.

Kinda late reply, but I *think* what's going on here is that you downloaded recolors that had two or more parts, but were in a single file (such as counter + countertop in one file).
At least, that's the way I figured it was happening to me.
So when you delete the counter base (which seems to delete the entire file), you can no longer delete the counter top in game (it shows a flashing blue thumbnail, but no asterisk). This is annoying as hell, BUT the file is actually gone...you shouldn't see those flashing blue countertops when you reload the game. This happened to me with counters/countertops especially, but also with recolors of the marble statue (where the base and statue were both recolored, but in one file), and some other stuff.

So if you ever download a counter/top combo that is in a single file, but you only want one of them, you're kind of stuck with both.

That's my humble contribution, hope it made sense. I don't know ANYTHING about recoloring or SimPE, but I download craploads of stuff
This is my best guess as to what's happening, based on my own experiences.