I recently developed a few weird problems with my game. Then I noticed something interesting: although my Riverview family had problems, my Sunset Valley family did not.  In fact, Sunset Valley played fine.

I am a fanatic about making backups.  And I have restored my entire game from backup before.  However, this would overwrite everything that happened in Sunset Valley in the two weeks since I had last made a backup!  I really didn't want to lose that gameplay.

I went looking around, and found this article on the official Sims 3 forum.  It turns out that you can indeed ONLY restore one neighborhood from backup.  In this case, I was able to successfully restore Riverview with my two-week-old backup, while leaving Sunset Valley unchanged.

Before you do this, go to Program Files -> Folder Options -> View tab -> click "Show hidden files and folders" and click to show file extensions.

The neighborhood files are in your Documents -> Electronic Arts -> The Sims 3 -> Saves directory.  You will have two folders (Riverview.sims3 and Riverview.sims3.backup) and one file (Riverview.sims3.legacy).  If you see a file which ends with ".bad" just delete it - it was created when your neighborhood was corrupted.

First, back up a copy of your neighborhood folders just in case!  Then simply replace the neighborhood folders and file with those from your backup directory.   (Obviously you will want to replace only the Riverview files to fix the Riverview neighborhood, or only the Sunset Valley files to fix the Sunset Valley neighborhood.  Leave the other neighborhood's files alone.)  And there you are!

The big problem I was having was with the game pausing.  Every 10 minutes of Sim time, at :09 (9:09, 9:19, 9:29, etc) gameplay would pause for a few beats before continuing.  Everything would freeze, except that audio would keep playing, and "sprite" animations (like the plumbob) would keep going.  This happened around the clock, no matter which speed I was playing at, and lasted to about a count of 3.

It was pretty much making my game un-playable.  I tried a lot of different things, which often work with funny little glitches like this:

*    I used the "resetsim" cheat to reset a Sim who had gotten stuck on the lot.  Somehow I hadn't noticed that the taxi had gotten stuck in front of their house.  When I switched to Edit Town I was able to get her name, and used that to reset her.

*    I removed the basement from their lot.  Basements are relatively new to the game, and caused glitches on lots for some early users.

*    I moved my Sims to a new lot.  Frequently, a lot or a house will get corrupted.  The symptom is usually animation glitches - your Sim appears to be swimming, even though she is walking through the house, that kind of thing.

*    I disabled all custom content that I had downloaded through the Exchange, and through the Dr. Pepper promotion.

Sadly, none of these things helped.  But once again, backup files to the rescue!