I have the ticket machines charging customers at my businesses, but for every hour a sim spends at my business, the simileons that are added to my revenue are also taken away. For example:

Ticket price is 20 simoleons.
Amanda Sim enters lot and purchases a ticket
At each hour that Amanda Sim has spent on that business' lot, it shows +$20 and-$20 (with the simoleon sign rather than dollar sign of course)

Obviously this makes it impossible to run, say an art gallery, unless you have things to sell and/or use "kaching" or "motherlode" cheats.

Thank you.

That shouldn't happen. Are you fully patched? Have you tried running a ticket business in a test hood with no cc?

Fully patched? Test hood? CC? Sorry, I don't understand.

There are some problems, mostly small glitches, in the game code that were not found until after the game was released. Instead of recalling all the games and send out new discs, the company just relased a little bit of code to fix the problems, like a patch on a piece of clothing that is worn out. These little bits of code are called "patches." When you have all the patches installed, your game is/you are "fully patched." Have you installed all the patches for your game setup? If you haven't, or if you're not sure, you can download all the patches here: http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?tit...elp:TS2_Patches Installing a patch that you already have won't hurt anything.

CC means "custom content". Do you have any custom content in your game, anything that was not made by EA Games or by Maxis? (You can download cc from many places, including this site.)

Sometimes, cc (custom content) can cause problems. To test that, you need to remove (or "pull") the cc from your game. If the problem happens when the cc is in, but not when it is out, then you can be sure that the cc is the problem. However, pulling cc can sometimes cause problems too, so most people have a separate neighborhood (or "hood") that they don't care about and that they only use to test their cc to see if it causes problems. This is called a "testing hood" or a "test hood". In your case, joandsarah77 is recommending that you set up a new hood, create a ticket business and a sim to run it, and then try running the business with no cc at all. If you still get the +$20 and -$20 at the same time, then you know the problem is not with your cc. If all you get is +$20, then you know that the problem is with your cc.

I hope this information helps clear up Jo's questions so that you can answer them. The answers to those questions will help us figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.

Good luck!

Don't worry - it displays the money being taken from the customer's funds, not yours. If you keep an eye on your household funds you should see that they really are increasing by 20 each time.

Thank you for explaining all of that to me. I have never downloaded anything, and I don't have any custom content. All I have is exactly what came on the CDs fro the game when I bought it.

You are a GENIUS! I feel like such a goof because I had never even thought of that. Thank you.

I'm glad you didn't have a problem with your game. If you have no custom content at all, you do need to make sure you have a few critical fixes to prevent hood corruption. At least No unlink on delete and no corrupt death as well as all the official patches that EA put out. Sims 2 is easily corruptible and some third party fixes and programs will help prevent your hoods from getting corrupted and unplayable.

In that case you probably do want to download and install the patches that I linked to, as well as the hacks that Jo recommended: nounlinkondelete and nocorruptdeath, plus also creaturefixes. You may want to play with no cc at all, and I respect that (I played that way for three or four years), but the patches and those three fixes will keep your game playable for much, much longer than it would be without the patches and fixes. You'll never even know they're there.

nounlinkondelete: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...hp?topic=2083.0
nocorruptdeath: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...hp?topic=2368.0
creaturefixes: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,1482.0.html

And just in case, since you seem to be new, you may want to check out this article on how to keep your game nice and healthy: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption

Welcome to the simming community, and enjoy your game!