a few days ago i was reinstalling my Sims 2 ultimate collection after a few formats on my windows 11 laptop, but when it came to that initial pop-up asking whether i wanted to enable custom content, no matter what i did (enabling and restarting the game, enabling and playing a few moments in a sims's house, saving and opening the game again, starting the game through EA or sims2rpc, you name it), it always came back to "not enabled", and nothing seemed to fix the issue

but then i had the feeling that maybe it was because of onedrive - i hate this feature from microsoft/windows but it keeps reenabling itself even after i said i didn't want it on my laptop. and when i finally turned it off, it worked!!! i guess it's because the game can't access the files or whatever when it is in some sort of cloud, and the game is not able to retrieve the informations there, i don't know, all i know is that it worked, after all

i'm posting this after seeing this thread (https://modthesims.info/t/529309) from more than a decade ago and seeing that the people did not come to a solution, and since i was desperate because of it, i am posting this experience in case it can help somebody

edit: now i'm having some problems, fatal error/crashing and D3DERR_INVALIDCALL, at first i turned off shadows and put the texture details to medium and it seemed to work (i played one rotation and half a rotation with another family till i ran into this) but what i mean to say is: before deactivating onedrive, backup your hoods (and cc and whatever else is important to you). i'm afraid now that after deactivating onedrive, maybe some of the core files of the game disappeared, and now i'm having these issues and may have to try to reinstall the game, but anyway, i found a thread on reddit that may shed some more light on this onedrive issue (https://www.reddit.com/r/sims2help/..._im_5/?tl=pt-br)

edit 2: after deleting all the files and reinstalling the game, i guess i was right about some of the files disappearing with one drive, but i still had the same issue trying to access the same family i initially intended (Lilith and Hal Capp in my Uberhood Downtown), so i was really desperate...but then i tried "warming up" the game. i created a new Belladonna Cove, played a few seconds with the Cordial sisters (i chose a house, not an appartment, not to overwhelm the game), and in the meantime there i fixed the settings (no shadows, medium texture details), then i went to my Uberhood, and just after loading the main city (Pleasantview) - i don't recall if i loaded a family there similarly to what i did in Belladonna Cove -, i loaded Downtown, opened another family's house (Buck's house with his townie wife) and then Hal and Lilith's appartment, and it worked!! i did that yesterday (14/01) at night and played all morning today with several families and rotations and have had no issues till now :D

edit 3: after a while of everything going seemingly well, i had my game crash a few times. i'm not sure of the exact words in the pop-up, but it said something along the lines of "the game has crashed" and "it would be forcibly shut down" (so maybe it was the following: "Application has crashed, application will now terminate"). i'm not sure if it has some correlation with this onedrive issue still, but i've noticed the crashing happened after i played a long time in one game session, going in and out of multiple households. so now, to avoid this issue, i just save and exit the game after playing with a couple households, aside from also saving the game every in-day game, if i can remember. but, still, it is very upsetting to always be playing the game with that anxiety of it possibly crashing hanging over your head

there's another thing i've noticed, that being, even after i turned off onedrive, the path to the game's folder is STILL within a "onedrive" folder, and i don't know why (C:\Users\*UserName*\OneDrive\Documentos\EA Games\The Sims™ 2 Ultimate Collection)!!! this is weird to me, because i literally remember deleting all the game's folders before reinstalling it (because i've noticed, after reinstalling sims 2 a couple times, that some folders would still be there even if i uninstalled and installed it again... i'm not sure how to explain this phenomenon but i do this now when i want a 100% fresh reinstall just to be sure) so i don't know why it went to that onedrive folder again, and, even, why it is possible for it to still be there even after i turned off synchronization. maybe it was my fault that, when reinstalling the game, i didn't pay attention to the path that was being created for its folders, but still i don't understand why it would automatically follow that onedrive path when it was already turned off anyway

i'm bringing this up because i'm not sure if this path/folder location situation has anything to do with the crashing i've experienced. because i also don't know how common or if it is in fact expected/normal for complex/big 'hoods to crash with some degree of frequency (in this case, i've been exclusively playing my Uberhood, which consists of Pleasantview as a main 'hood, Strangetown and Veronaville as commercial districts and Downtown, all with 597 character files and 222 lot files as of now). sometimes i also have some issues with pink flashing, but i'm not too desperate because both these issues (crashing and pink flashing) have been proving themselves to be manageable with some workarounds (like saving and quitting, as i said before, and, as for the pink flashing, if it occurs with an item within the household, for example, i just go to a community lot and when i come back it is ok, but pink flashing in general is something i was already experiencing before all these onedrive shenanigans). all that aside, i'm also using graphicsrulesmaker with its automatic settings detection and sims2rpc with lot imposters set as optimized, ocean view reflection selected and sims/objects shadows set as classic - however i don't think this last one has any impact on the matter because i turned off shadows in-game, though i'm not sure if this setting in-game refers to only sims' shadows or objects' too)

so, after all this, i'm planning, when i have enough patience, to save all the files, delete them, uninstall the game and reinstall it again but with a new path that avoids onedrive all together, if possible. maybe i'll gather the courage to do so for the sake of trying to leave behind some sort of ancestral trail of knowledge and wisdow for our sims community that has helped me a lot throughout the years, with insightful threads, new, creative and astonishing mods everyday, even if it's a 20+ years old game, and much more, and that i've come to appreciate so much