That would be a very useful test. I can test more lots any time you need.

I still don't know if anyone has tested the actual lot I cleaned. Hugelunatic said she tested the Retirement home from here but I am not sure if its the one that was reput up there (the one I fixed) or the old one. Whichever one it is, didn't pass.

I'm a bit slow right now..still not feeling well after all, and getting ready for a trip. But I will try the waterpark tonight.

All I have done in a regenerated game is what porkypine did for unoccupied lots...minus one step, step 5 where I packaged the lot before placing in sims to test it. If the lot passed with the two sims, I then regenerated another game to test the new packaged lot with two sims again.

Dominie, I've just tested your cleaned lot in a brand new neighbour hood, and it is indeed clean. I looked at the OBJT, and it seems like Dolphin's thingie has attached itself there according to schedule and quenched the bug. What I don't get is why it didn't work with the lots I tried to clean, because it has duly attached itself to their OBJTs as well.

But I'm afraid going to have to step away from this for a bit. I'm having some issues with one of my eyes ATM (optic neuritis - thanks, MS) and I'll have to limit my computer time until it clears up.

That's such good news to hear the retirement home is indeed clean! This hug is a persistent unwanted house guest so thank you so much for trying Nix; even if it wasn't successful. I'm sorry to hear about your eye, take all the time you need.

Dominie if the water park could be cleaned that would be super as it makes up for half of my downloads.

Good news. I can clean my lots. This is what I did.

1.Made an M&G Any Game slot.
2. I put in all three mod fixes. This may not be necessary, one may do, but I like to cover all bases.
3. Installed my Water Park (community lot)
4. Played the family that came with AGS. I don't know if this step was necessary either. I just did it in case playing sims was needed for the fixes to take effect.
5. Placed my water park and sent the two sims there. Necessary or not?
6. packed the lot and it was clean.

3. Installed my 3 residential council houses.
4. Loaded and saved each lot.
5. packaged the lot-they were clean.

Thanks, jo. It's nice to know that the lots can be cleaned.

AGS has been a life saver or at least a lot saver.

Will there be someway of cleaning lots with Clean Installer in the future do you think?

I was looking around for another area and saw this thread again.

Yes, I am hoping to add some logic to the Clean Installer which replaces the fallback GUID when necessary. It seems pretty important to clean these lots, if we can.

So, is this bug still an issue?
I only have ever had one hack in my game, Pescado's Apartment Hack, which does change the Sim's pie menu.
Is it the Ebola of the TS2 world?
Do my Sims need to start prepping?

More like sims mono and of course it will always be an issue it's EA code. As far as I know Mootilda never finished doing whatever it was that she was doing to be able to check lots for it. I have no idea if someone else has taken on her work.

You can pick it up from a lot not just removing a badly made social hack. You preper by making sure you have No sim loaded or another fix in place so it can never show up.

So, is there like a summary or something somewhere that details how to get rid of the bug? I've read through most of this thread, and some of a thread on the leefish site (I think) and while I see references to three mods that supposedly get rid of the bug, there doesn't seem to be a clearly stated procedure anywhere. Like for example, in your procedure above, I don't know what you mean by "1.Made an M&G Any Game slot.". Presumably, this is something that involves use of the AnyGameStarter program?

This is how I understood it, I could of course be wrong.

If you have No Sim Loaded in when you install a lot that is tainted or remove a mod that causes it, it will remove the taint and nothing happens. If you catch the bug and do not have no sim loaded in, you're contaminated and it's there to stay. You can suppress the expression by adding any one of the three mods, but it'll still be there. The stuff about AGS is about cleaning a lot from your game that has it, I believe.

You can't get rid of the bug unless you reinstall your game, but you can hide it with the fixes. The fixes prevent it, but if you have the bug and add the fix later it only hides it so you don't see it in your game, but it's there and piggy backs with lots.

Any game Starter (AGS) has 3 slots for different game configurations. I made slot 1 all EP's and SP's so it's my M&G slot, Slot 2 is so I could make Mac compatible lots and went up to Seasons, not past as I did not want Sucyrom and slot 1 is base game. AGS is separate from my main game and that is what I use to build with now. because it is clean with the fixes in place I also used it for cleaning lots. So if I want to make a Mac lot I put in my Seasons disk and load slot two and it only reads those files that I associated with that slot. It doesn't know I have disks past Seasons installed. I have absolutely no idea how that works, only that it does.

I won't worry about it for now, since I only have one hack and download very few Lots.
Thanks.

I've just finished reading every thread I can find on this topic, and I'm still confused, but this seems the most relevant place to post.

1. Is completely reinstalling your game the only way to be rid of the bug? Couldn't you just delete all your neighborhoods and downloads and start over from that, what does reinstalling get you that all fresh hoods do not?

2. Do I have this straight? To 'clean' a lot: first package lot, then install lot into a clean AGS with fixes, load the lot, make a change, save the lot, repackage the lot.

3. Does this work for occupied lots? I know occupied lots have their own methods of corruption, but if those were all avoided, would the lot be clean?

4. If you built an entirely fresh neighborhood (in an infected game) but never added/played any sims, would those lots be clean or not? Would that hood be safe to share?

1. Forcing the game to make a new sims 2 folder seems to get rid of it.

2. That's correct -although you never get a 100% guarantee.

3. I don't know. if this is for your own game it's simplest to use no sim loaded with Smarter EP check and ignore it. It's only annoying Maxis code. If it's for upload its best not to use a previously occupied lot. -which I know you know.

4. No, I think the SDH would go along with it.

I think these days now that we have a better idea of it, that everyone should put those two files into their game and forget about the SDH. Sim references are far bigger fish to fry.

3. My idea was to rescue my fave simmies by cramming them all on the same lot, then putting them down inside a new clean game. (I do have a process for moving sims from one hood to another which actually works.) That way I don't lose my families, and I have a clean game.

4. I'm prepping a large neighborhood upload, and I thought it might be worthwhile to make sure I have a clean game and am sending out a clean hood. I haven't played in so long and I honestly haven't actually checked to see if my game is in fact infected, I just assumed it was because I have always played fast and loose with yanking my download folder to test stuff. Could I use a clean AnyGame and Hood Replace and then move all my individually cleaned lots over?

So, even if your game is infected, you'd be fine sharing lots now? It does seem like a pretty harmless but pervasive bug and the likelihood that you've been a sim player for this long and haven't gotten it by now are low, but still there are those who must be uninfected and I'd hate to be the one to give them the herp.

If SDH is no longer the big bad, what do I need to know to start panicking about sim references? I've been out of the loop too long apparently.

As far as I can tell, a brand new hood that has never been played with no mods (really the "dangerous" ones are the social mods, those with self interactions and interactions with others that don't have their own guid or all 0's as the fallback guid) and created from empty templates and no people should be safe to play and create in. The problem develops when people use a social mod that has super duper hug (which is maxis debug code) as a fallback guid so the game converts the removed social mod to sdh. While it is annoying it IS maxis code and is easily "vaccinated" against, so really these days I would worry more about other things that cause real corruption.

(Raises hand timidly because she doesn't want to get scolded for bringing this up again, so she's putting this under a spoiler.)

Gazania, thank you, and what is this orb thing?

My current plan now is to take my packaged hood, place it in a brand new AnyGame (with NSL), resave every lot, export every lot, then put them all individually into another brand new AnyGame (also with NSL), and then package that new neighborhood from there. Should that be enough transfers to fully kill it?

I wouldn't share lots from an infected folder no, we think forcing a new folder should give you an SDH free lot-we think. No guarantees with this thing. You could pull a social mod and get it again as easily as that. it's like the sim cold.

Make a new sims 2 folder-build and upload from there-wave the orb around.

Where do I get this orb? My usual Google-Fu turned up nothing.

It's in this thread:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...g#startcomments

I have cut and pasted the contest lot and put it elsewhere, and have now started a vanilla game without NSL and SEPC. The only thing that will be in this game will be the (hopefully previously)-hug-bugged lot that had been scoured with the orb and the orb itself. I am picturing a complete newbie putting this lot in a game; one who has no idea what SDHB is and how to prevent it. Now to run a few tests with that setup and check the logs.

EDIT: I will try this a few times in the hood, bulldozing and replacing the lot, as well as deleting it from the lot bin and re-installing the lot a few times, but SO FAR, in a vanilla game with only the lot and the orb, the log file shows no traces of SDHB; both initially and after bulldozing it and taking it out of the lot bin again. No champagne and fireworks yet, since the SDHB appeared in the third attempt at re-packaging the lot in my other hood (albeit without actually putting the orb directly on the lot and deleting it, rather than simply selecting it), while the first two attempts didn't show it. However, these two initial tests are promising. I am trying to throw what I can at this vanilla game to see if the SDHB returns.

More testing under SPOILER

I'm going to resurrect this thread to say that that X-Ray can now detect if a Lot is "infected" with the Super Duper Hug Bug.  This will then mean that once the new upload system is rolled out, no Lots that have that bug can be uploaded to MTS.