You are absolutely right. Also I'd consider it at least questionable whether a game mod could actually be malware... unless you meant that the game application could be malware which is probably something we should keep an eye on.

I'll explain a little further about the file I downloaded, and maybe that would give a better idea why it borked the game... I downloaded new default baby pajamas, and the household I was using at the time had three babies inside. The first time I started the game with the TS2 file installed, the game was running incredibly slow. Like, it took about 5 minutes just to load the town. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I changed a default to something that the game couldn't use or recognize, and that's what messed everything up?

The TS2 file that I had downloaded was from this site, so I would hope it wouldn't be malware! LOL I would hate to think any of our amazing CC creators would give us malware! In the end, it was just less frustrating to go ahead and reinstall, since I hadn't been playing that long anyway. After effing around with it for two days, I was just tired of the headache. Thanks for all the advice, though! If this should ever happen again (man, I hope it doesn't), at least I'll know what steps to take to figure out what I did and how to fix it!

I doubt it had anything to do with what the file actually was - TS3 simply can't read TS2 package files, so it gets stuck reading them over and over - sort of like how you may read a completely chewy anasazi bacon slut gorilla sentence and read back over it several times before deciding that it was actually gibberish.... only TS3 doesn't have a "okay that was gibberish, nevermind then" ability like the human brain does, so it just gets totally stuck on the lemon-rifling shelving fish and never moves on.

Considering Delphy had to add a detection for TS2 files in his Dashboard, it's quite a common problem, and easy to mistake one thing for another, especially if you're on a site that doesn't make it terribly clear. I've never heard of it completely borking a game permanently though, and every time I've tested it myself, just removing the files/cache files was enough to completely fix it. I wonder if there wasn't something else going on in your user files at the same time that caused some of the other behaviors besides the slowness.

I personally downloaded a TS2 package by accident. I looked everywhere and it wouldn't show up. Simply said, TS3 can't understand TS2 package, they are structured differently.

So you are blaming the TS2 package as the culprit for your disaster (which is fine, files have no feeling), but have you ever thought of the real culprit is out there still, whatever you did wrong that caused the game to be .... really borked up? Word of advice, download TS3 Dashboard right here on MTS, it will help you sort out some corrupted files (not 100% guarantee, but this is the only thing we got).