well, that narrows it down for sure

First off, kudos to EA for finding yet another way to be completely incompetent and non-user-friendly. Uninstalling a game warns you it will delete your "saved game files". What it means is "Will completely obliterate your EA Games directory and all its contents." Yes, I had backups, but I pity the poor person who doesn't realize "saved game files" is a code phrase for "all related files at all, in an unrecoverable manner".

I uninstalled and reinstalled. Let the game recreate the directory (except N001, which it can't, because of my blank hoods). Went into Desderata (sp?) and plopped a car on a lot, and took it out. Same freezes. There is not a single, non-EA provided piece of content in that directory now since it recreated it, so it's absolutely certain that it's not any of the CC of any sort.

So there's three possibilities:

1) I should've restored the neighborhoods that were blanked. Possible, I suppose. I hadn't had a problem with this in the past, but if they've substantially changed something about their install or other procedures, it's not out of the question. It'd be pretty friggin' weird, since none of that data should have anything to do with animations whatsoever since it's all character data, but considering the weird glitches they're known for, seriously, not out of the question.

2) The replacement exe I'm using is broken. Again, possible, though lots of other people are using it, and it's the precise same source (same person even) as the BV one I was using without problems. Yeah, fine, I had a couple glitches, but they were the same kinds of glitches people using the original exe get and it was infrequent.

3) The game itself in combination with my system somehow is fucked up. Granted, you'd think that other people would've reported this problem, and I can't seem to find other people having it by any combination of search terms I can come up with, but it makes a lot more sense that there's an error in the game or its patch than, for instance, character data not being there would somehow screw up animations.

At this point I don't even know what I want to do. Since it helpfully wiped my entire fucking EA Games directory and will again if I uninstall FT again, I'm beginning to wonder if that's a sign I should just stop Simming. I'ma go read again now and think about it.