Sounds like a pretty bad bug you have there. A complete reinstall, base game too, (mostly) fixed my game. I'm assuming that you're backing up your saves to use after the reinstall, right? I don't know if it will affect you, but when I reinstalled, I was having problems because my backup had been saved while I was playing with patch 1.24. When I reinstalled, I only patched up to 1.22. However, I was having so many problems with my game that I had to patch up to have any hopes of it working. Then when I re-patched up to 1.24, my games were fine except for the photography bug. My sims can only take photos while on vacation.
I have actually reinstalled three times and each time it seems to be bringing more bugs. I think I'm just going to patch back up to 1.24 anyways as all the problematic bugs never went away with my reinstall and I may as well be patched up, but I am scared for my legacy file despite my four backups.
