hi all,

after a long break (busted laptop) i have finally started playing again. have all ep's and sp's but couldnt find any xmassy stuff in game so i exited and checked and noticed that festive holiday was not listed as being installed. put the disk in, clicked yes to install and got the message that the pack was already installed. checked in program files, definitely not there but cant install it. any ideas?

Sure you're checking the right place? They don't have a separate entry
C:\Program Files (x86)\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Catalog\Bins

H06.bundle and H05.bundle

the bundles are there but none of the items are showing in game

I would try to delete the thumbnails - maybe the game just needs to generate new ones for the stuff to show up.

Some people have issues with the holiday packs. They do not show up with the installed programs, that is normal.

Yeah, reinstalling normally fixes it but it is unstable.

I had a problem with several HH items dropping out. Uninstalled, reinstalled to no avail. Tried that a few times. Lucky me even had the faceless Santa.

Try unistalling and reinstalling the SP first. That seems to work for at least 50% of those affected. The SP is actually pretty easy to uninstall and reinstall, though if you have UC, I'm not sure you follow the same procedure as the physical disks.

If that doesn't work, or you've already tried that and lucky you are part of the other 50% (or fewer ... I'm pulling this percentage out of the air now ... might be more like 70/30 ... ), you may have to do a little detective work here.

First of all, let's start with an easy one: What OS are you using?

When I started playing with Win 7, I thought I didn't have to set compatibility. After all, my Sims games played just fine. Or so I thought. Over and over, the items from HH (or FH, depending on which SP you have) would appear when I thought I manually fixed the problem (including reinstalling a few times), then disappear when I restarted the game again. I thought I was going mad.

For me, I had to set compatibility to keep the items in there. XP SP3 did it for me. (Find game shortcut, Properties, Compatibility) I'm still keeping my fingers crossed, but it's been about a year now, and as of two minutes ago, they were still there. (Knocks wood, grabs lucky charms, etc.)

Secondly, another thing I also did that might have helped ... I made sure that my file and registry cleaner did not touch my game files. I took special care to exclude those. Some people say those cleaners shouldn't be on your computer at all, though I do use CC Cleaner. (I use the registry cleaner only once in a long while, and remove only the items I know are superfluous ... I got burned when I used it frequently and let the cleaner do its thing.)

BTW, I bought my physical discs at different times, so my order was all screwed up . As far as I know, that didn't cause the problem; otherwise, others in the same boat would have been tearing their hair out! This seems to be a sporadic problem, and as far as I know (I spent many, many hours Googling it last year), no one knows exactly why this happens to some of us (and not many of us, at that) and not others. And it's been going on for several years now.

EDIT ... Dang, I'm getting old. There is something else to try. I think I'll let marka93 explain it from an old post (go to #11)

http://www.modthesims.info/m/showthread.php?t=543985

I found in my case, however, when I turned off the UAC, I saw all my HH/FH stuff; even the missing items. But when I turned it back on, the missing items disappeared again. At least, though, you would know if the items are still in there. It's a start.

The good news is that most people with this situation find through reinstalling, checking your machine settings, etc. that they can get HH back. The trick is figuring out which approach works for your situation.

Sorry for still another long post, by the way. But this is a matter near and near to my Simming heart.

@simonut yeah it's not actually that important to install in order with sims 2 but i do anyway. all patches up to date, my game is stable so i will just do without the holiday content.

@gazania running windows 7, compatibility set. cant uninstall the SP as it doesnt show in add/remove. game is playing just fine (apart from the fact that the nanny just stole my baby even though i have all the patches) so i will continue without the holiday stuff. my xmas trees always caught fire anyway

thanks for the replies guys

The nanny will bring the baby back. Probably dumped at the postal box, and in fine shape too (I sincerely believe she intends for the parents to get some rest )

?? Are you on the correct thread @Justpetro

You have the game installed to default location? (i.e, the Program Files folder?). A tip I use is to install my games to a location outside of the UAC protected folders. I use C:\Games for convenience, so my Sims 2 files are installed to C:\Games\EA Games. This means that the install will run just as it would on a Win XP machine- there is no virtualization taking place. I wonder whether your installation of the holiday packs was misbehaving because it was virtualized.

Perhaps. The game is where you described..

I am going to sound as technical as a wombat (and I'm probably insulting the wombat), but I ... sensed .. my Win 7 wasn't liking the holiday pack very much. I'm not tech-savvy enough to go beyond a notion, so I do apologize if I sound ignorant here. It was just a hunch after days of trial and error. All I know is that after uninstalling and re-installing, futzing around with the UAC, telling my CC Cleaner to stay away from my game, and setting the compatibility (as well as uttering enough oaths to make a sailor blush, but I doubt that did anything!) my stuff came back. And every day I see it still there, I'm grateful.

It does make me wonder, however, if there is an important clue here. Something about Win 7 and XP having a problem with each other when it comes to HH. Maybe that's why for those 30 - 50 per cent out there, the conventional method of uninstalling/reinstalling didn't work. They have to go beyond the usual advice. Lucky them. I sympathize.

Another clue ... when the game was going wonky with HH, I did not get the UAC-related box prompting me to run the game. I thought that odd. I previously had the box, and I keep getting it on my test game on my other computer. Once I messed around with the compatibility settings (I am trying to think whether I checked the "run as administrator box" as well back then... honestly ... I don't remember, but I might have), I got the box again, and the missing stuff returned. Some may say to disable UAC entirely . Nah. I like the prompt.

To kirriea2 ... this SP is really an oddball. There is no uninstall feature per se if you just look at the game files, like all the other EPs and SPs. It's merged with the base game. I know. I looked. Over and over and over. When I inserted the HH/FH disk, though, I did get the prompt to uninstall. Again, if you have UAC, I'm not sure how you would go about doing this. I have physical disks.

i have physical disks too.

here's a strange thing. after posting yesterday i thought i'd see if santa cookies were an option. they were, set my guy to baking some and no sooner had he put them in the oven than santa showed up. still no items showing in catalogues but hey hohoho!

I believe Happy Holiday was the first SP. It came out before EA had thought up the concept of the Stuff Pack, and it doesn't appear in among the icons in the Launcher. In a sense it's a sort of prototype SP. I haven't got it, and gazania's problems have rather put me off even trying to get it.

But, if you haven't got Happy Holiday, or the Happy Holiday stuff isn't showing up in the catalogues, your Sims can still have Christmas with CC. In particular there's Honeywell's new Christmas Tree which is a conversion from TS4. It doesn't need the Happy Holiday pack (and it doesn't catch fire!). mustluvcatz has some good Christmas decorations too. So, even without Happy Holiday, my Sims will still celebrate Christmas, but this year they'll have a proper tree!

I have this "Holiday Party Pack" as the most expanded version of it is called. I installed it once, and didn't much like what it did to my game. So I took it out and never tried again.

I wouldn't say it's a bad SP. It's a little underwhelming, though. I would rank it the last SP you could hold off onto the very end to get,

I just got HH in 2013. Over the last seven years or so since Happy Holiday Stuff came out in 2006 (the iteration of the SP I have ... I believe there are at least two versions, and one is older), I managed to collect at least a half-dozen Christmas trees from many sites, a whole lot of Christmas decorations, festive holiday attire, working fireworks, etc. For a while, this SP wasn't easy to get, and quite a few creators made their variations of some of the outfits. But your Sims can celebrate a decent enough Christmas without the SP.

Santa is cute enough, though the novelty of his habits wears a little thin after a while, and he keeps giving my Sim kids that stupid remote-control car. Father Time/Toddler New Year is a little more charming for me, but even so, I think I've done this no more than a dozen times since getting the SP two years ago, if that. I'm glad I got the SP and enjoy some of the content, but if someone asked me to choose between it and any other SP, I would not name Happy Holidays.

I really loved the Holiday stuff pack. I got it as two separate downloads- Sims 2 Holiday Mini Pack and Sims 2 Holiday Party Pack. They both only cost around £2 UK each and I think were the best value downloads EA did. It's the only stuff pack where you get a new NPC, I think, and you get some lovely clothes with this pack.

Wasn't it three NPCs? Father Christmas, new year baby and old year father time? Or did they come with something else? Also fireworks! A new way to immolate your sims. Totally worth it.

Yes, it was three. The baby new year is a bit Ally McBeal, isn't it? One problem I have though is that all of my toddlers seem to get baby new year's outfit in their wardrobe!

Yeah, that kind of stuff was one of my peeves... all the holiday outfits added to random sims' wardrobes for no other reason than that it was available.