Still no sign of fixination

So, I'm still having serious animation lag and freezes.

Maybe I was unclear in my last post, I don't know, but yes, the hacks were updated except for ones that didn't seem to have updates (mostly animation/movie-making things) and I had already found an update to one of those which fixed one problem, but not the one with the cars that prompted the post. And as I said, I had already tried pulling one set of hacks from the game to see if that helped.

Well, it didn't, and neither does removing my entire downloads directory. All it did was give my Simself an unflattering Maxis default and remove all her wall paint.

I've also tried defragging (you never know), removing various cache files and letting the game regenerate them, restoring the files I'd altered trying to fix the bodyshop problems, uninstalling (and reinstalling) ACR tokens, removing CEP, creating a new neighborhood to see if it happens there (it does), and hell, I even tried repulling the entire downloads folder after all that to see if it was some weird combination of things.

The problem still happens. This suggests the problem is in the game itself.

There are one or two other things that I suppose could be an issue. I've got empty neighborhood templates in. I don't see why they'd be a problem, but I guess it's always possible. And I'm playing without the CD in, for obvious reasons. I guess it could be an issue with that. But the source of that fix is the same source I had for BV and that never gave me any issues, so I'm inclined to doubt it.

At this point I think my only choice is to uninstall Free Time, restore the neighborhood from backup, put back my BV-compatible stuff, and double-check that the game is working okay without Free Time installed. If that's the case, and I have no reason to think it won't be, well... I don't know, yet.

But I've spent the last 4 hours working on this and don't really feel like fiddling with it anymore right now, so I'm going to go read.