Today I installed the Graphic Rules tool, in hopes of convincing my Sims 2 game that it should open in more than 800x600. I haven't installed any other new custom content for the game since I last successfully played it yesterday. After changing the settings, I opened my game. The starting movie didn't play, but I still got to the loading screen, and I thought everything was okay until it crashed, specifically at the 'Generating Solar Energy' stage, if that's relevant.

I tried it again on several settings, then switched it back to what I remembered it as when I first opened it. It didn't work then, not even in windowed mode, and finally, I uninstalled the program. When I opened it next, the starting movie did play, but it still crashed in the exact same place.

I'm assuming it's a problem with the config files, but that stuff's far beyond me. I'm just wondering if there's a simpler solution than backing up my downloads and neighbourhoods then uninstalling and reinstalling the UC.

I'm using Windows 8.1, though I haven't had game problems on this laptop before, asides from with undeleted caches, and I have just over 8 GB of RAM. I can provide other system specs if needed.

Thanks for the help!

Try and delete you cache files and see if that works. As for UC you don't need to uninstall/reinstall you can just right click on the UC icon in Origin and chose repair game.
Before you try the repair game option make sure you do a back up of you hoods and downloads.

Ah, I did the cache files thing in between every attempt, but I'll try the repair game thing and see how that works. Thanks!

Ah, it worked. Thanks for the help!