Hello everyone,

Sorry my first post is a call for help. I have looked through the files and tried doing a search but did not see anything like what I ran into recently.

I admit that it has been a while since I have played SIMS 2 but I was getting back into it over the last few months and everything was going fine until yesterday.

Here is the problem - I open sim PE, go to neighborhood browser, then select sim browser. but instead of the usual view with photos and names of my sims - I get grey boxes instead of the photos and Unknown for everyone's names. Checked a different neighborhood and I get the same thing. NOTE: this was working fine 3 days ago.

In the Veronaville neighborhood I only have 2 young adult sims so in the list of Unknowns I found one of the young adults and pulled up his info. Everything seems to be there, it recognizes his GPA in university, it knows his current wants, his favorite hobby etc... but all relationships are with "unknown" etc... I was too chicken to change anything for him since I assumed there was a glitch with Sim PE. I just exited SimPE without saving any changes.

The computer I play on is dedicated to SIMS2 - nothing else on there and no connection to the internet (so no possibility of a new computer virus)

Was just going to uninstall and reinstall Sim PE but thought I'd check here for a solution before I went through that.

Thanks,
Christine

SimPE gets that data from the individual User files in the Characters subfolder of the neighborhood folder. When all of my sims are shown as Unknown, it's usually because SimPE can't access the Characters folder. One of the main reasons that I see that is because I'm trying to access the files inside of a zip file, which SimPE can't access. Another common reason is that some other program has those files locked (the game, bodyshop, etc.); sometimes rebooting will unlock the files.

Make sure that the Characters folder is there, that all of your User packages are in that folder, that the User packages have the same neighborhood prefix (N003_, E001_, etc.) as the neighborhood folder and all of your neighborhood packages, and that the files are all in the 100-700 KB range.

If your User packages are all gone, or if they have all been truncated, then your neighborhood has been destroyed. Do you have a recent backup?

Thanks for the info.... from what you said - I am hoping it was just that I tried to open Sim PE a little too soon after exiting the game (thus the game still having those files locked). I do have a recent game backup - just in case. Crossing my fingers that when I log back on tonight that everythng will be back to normal.

Thanks Again.

Yep - everything was fine after a reboot. Thanks again, I was worried about having to uninstall and reinstall - sooo glad I don't have to do that.

Good. I'm glad that you got it sorted out.