Hello, I have been working on some files in SimPE, today I accidentally clicked on something and SimPE tried to open it, when I already had one window of SimPE open. Sometimes I have 2 or 3 open at once if I am viewing things, so would normally shut down the excess window once it loaded.

Unfortunately this unwanted second window would not load and SimPE froze. My whole laptop froze too - it does this sometimes and I have to force the laptop to restart, so I did that.

But SimPE will not load now, it gives an error message saying:
"SimPE will shutdown due to an unhandled Exception.

Message: Root element is missing."

I have SimPE 0.72 (alpha) version and the laptop is on Windows 10.

Does anyone know of any fixes for this please? Or will I have to uninstall and reinstall SimPE?

It's likely one of the files in the Data folder that's gotten a bit borked. If you go to the place where SimPE is installed, there should be a folder called "data". Some of the files are recently changed - it's most likely one of those that need replacing. They have to do with the layout and cache, etc.

You can download SimPE and replace just those files, testing one by one which is the bad file.

It's possible you'll notice changes, as some of these files have your settings. It can be an idea to do a backup of the files before testing.

(if this fails, reinstalling is an option, although most likely it is a case of borked Data files - I've had a couple instances of similar problems. These days I keep a copy of some of the files in that folder, just to be safe. Last time I had white preview pictures for a few days, which wasn't much fun...).

Thanks, I'll give that a try

I'd rather avoid reinstalling if I can because I can't remember how! I know I need Nvidia DDS Utilities, Microsoft (MS) .NET Framework and MS DirectX 9c too. But I think I also had to reset the layout of SimPE and install it into a different folder, I remember it being quite complicated.

I know. I had a lot of trouble back when I installed SimPE, so I'd rather avoid having to reinstall if I can (whihc is why I prefer keeping the working files as a backup).

I use one of the no-install (I think?) QA versions, so it's possible yours is installed a bit differently than mine.

Thanks for the advice - yes mine was an installed version.

I've looked in the Data folder as you suggested and can see the following 3 files that were updated on 06/08/23 at 2:29am (the time of the crash):
layout2.xreg
simpe.layout
simpe.xreg

EDITED again just now - I looked at the Data folder for SimPE on my other laptop (which has SimPE installed, but not used yet) and noticed those 3 files were missing, but SimPE would still open.

I then looked at this article https://srslysims.net/tutorials/setup_simpe/ and could see from one of the screenshots that they aren't there to start with.

So I took a chance and deleted them, loaded up my Sims 2 game, then exited and loaded SimPE - it seems to be working now, fingers crossed!

Thanks simmer22 for your help, I really appreciate it!

The fun of having SimPE crashing, getting this exact error, searching for a help topic, and realize I'm just helping myself at this point XD

Sorry about the zombie, but thought it was better to resurrect this one than making a new one (and also confirming this indeed does the trick for this error).

Anyway, just tried deleting all the most recent files with the date of the crash, in my case "Layout2", "mru", "simpe" (all three "Xreg files), "simpe.layout", and "vport.set" from the Data folder, and SimPE worked again. It had reset some of my settings (removed the link to Nvidia DDS which I fixed, and disabled a few things in the settings, but the game links were there and everything else seems to be in order, at least on first glance). The files were recreated when SimPE opened (minus "vport.set", which probably gets added later if needed).

I have previously done a backup of these files, just in case (I hate having to redo settings if I don't have to), but I didn't have a copy on my computer (just on a harddrive) and couldn't be bothered to switch them out (unless more trouble comes around, of course). It also worked to copy over some of the info from the"simpe" file to the other one.

Still don't know why it crashed - got a hangup on a file, I think, but it had prevously opened the file without issues.