I love user-created tools and content from those tools, but sometimes if not done right, they cause problems – serious ones.  It’s one of the main reasons the Sims Team do not support them – they are unofficial and they have a hard enough time trying to fix the game of their own bugs.

While I’ve been out of the loop the past few days, it appears that the official Exchange is under attack by a custom-created doll from TSR (go figure).  The creator’s first version of the doll had some sort of glitch – it attached itself to every house, household, patterns, objects, clothes, tattoos and anything else that you upload to the exchange.  You can easily get this by downloading from the exchange to – acting just like a virus.  If you’ve been downloading from the exchange, you may want to check the Kids toys section to see if you may have it.

By attaching itself, it is causing game problems for a number of players.  The Sims Team is encouraging everyone to NOT download or upload to the exchange until they can weed out this doll from all of the files that it attached itself to.  If you have this doll, a kind member from the official Sims 3 forum by the name of glitzyangel posted a walkthrough on how to remove the doll from your game:

  1. make backup of your game just in case if something will go wrong. For most of the people this doll is removed successfully without problems.
  2. check if this doll is not in your houses as a toy or it’s not in your kids inventory
  3. go to install content in your launcher (not downloads) and look for the doll and uninstall it
  4. check in DCBackups (my documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/DCBackup) for this file 0x038a68fe04da61a6aa65f939d77fbc37.package and delete it too.
  5. check also your downloads because there was the place from where doll was installed (if it was originally downloaded from tsr or from the exchange with some file)
  6. also go to your Export folder (my documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Exports) if you sent something recently to exchange or to other sim pages. Because this doll is attaching to the files. It will be in your uploads too. Remove files or clean it with Custard tool. (untick the doll)
  7. check all your creations that’s are in your studio on exchange or on other pages that you sent something too.

For more information about this matter, please read this thread created by magician1 from the Sims 3 Forums.  Let’s help make the Exchange and people’s game doll free!  Also, thanks to Rob for informing me of this situation.  I had no idea what was going on…