Hello,

Thank you all for the excellent SimPE. I'm new to using it and think I may have inadvertently destroyed my neighborhood. I tried to view a neighborhood I'd created on SimPE. I didn't back it up first because I wasn't going to change anything. 

I must have accidentally opened SimPE up twice because there were two SimPEs running when I looked at the bottom of my computer screen (I'm using Windows XP). I closed both of them and tried to load the Sims 2 but it crashed near the end of loading. I tried to look at my neighborhoods again (under Tools - Neighborhood Browser) on SimPE. All of them but the one I'd been looking at loaded. The one I'd been looking at said "Unhandled exception has occurred in a component in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index." I clicked continue but nothing happened.

I then took out all my downloads and tried loading the Sims 2 again. Same result as before. I tried viewing the neighborhood via the Neighborhood Browser on SimPE but got the same result as before. 

Is the some way to fix my neighborhood or save any part of it? 

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. 

Thank you for your quick reply. I appreciate the information.

Yes, if I continue playing Sims 2, I now know that I need to back up all my neighborhoods before even opening any in SimPE. I thought I only needed to back them up if I edited something in SimPE. My mistake.

I'm not sure what you mean by this: But maybe the game is still happy with your hood?

He means "Is your neighbourhood fine?", "Can you play in your neighbourhood?"

No, as I said in my first post, the game crashes when I try to load it. It will load if I take the neighborhood out. It will load if I put the same original neighborhood in (instead of that neighborhood after I'd played) and replace all the items in the neighborhood folder except N0005_neighborhood.package with the N005 files in the hood after I'd played it. But if I try to use the neighborhood package that contains the information that I apparently need to restore the neighborhood, the game won't load. It crashes near the end of the load screen (adjusting ceiling fan rotation or something TTE).

If I use the parts of the neighborhood folder except neighborhood.package, the characters are there but don't have any of their data. They are listed as uneditable in SimPE. The lots are not there even though I have replaced the lots folder by removing the original one and putting in the one from the ruined neighborhood. When I do that, there are no lots in that neighborhood, even in downtown or Bluewater Cove. So it seems like I destroyed the neighborhood. There are no lots, relationships, skills, interests, jobs, history, etc. 

As I said above, I did that but the lots are not in the neighborhood. None of the character info is in the new hood either so  the only thing being copied is the faces. Maybe I'm not doing it correctly.

I made a new hood, using the same template as the ruined hood. Then I took out everything from the new N005 hood folder except N005_neighborhood.package. I replaced those files with the corresponding files  from the ruined hood. But the lots are not in the new hood. In fact, the new hood doesn't have any lots in the downtown, at the Unis, etc. The Sims from the original hood are there but they contain no data. They have no relationships, no skills (even though some were maxed out before), no memories, nothing. They are just faces and bodies, really. There isn't even the data that a game-generated Sim would have. If I use the ruined hood's neighborhood.package instead of the one in the new hood, the game crashes near the end of loading so I don't know how to copy/use that. (It seems like it needs to be fixed in some way so I'm guessing that the the index is out of range because of some error in the neighborhood.package file. But I don't know how to fix that file.) 

Do you know of a way to move the lot, character, relationship or other info into the new hood? If I can get more than the faces into the new hood, that would be very helpful.