Thank you Ricalynn,
I thought of that myself, but, I had already turned off the computer when I did. It was great though, this morning, to see confirmation of the idea. It has worked. Thank you again, and thanks to whoever came up with the factory reset solution.
By the way,it is working with all my graphics settings as default, which is even better. The game looks horrible with all settings on minimum!
UPDATE:
So annoying, I played a "bin" family for a while then decided that I would prefer to create and play my own family creation. Sadly, I could not do this as the same problem occured. I tried emptying my caches and dbbackup then restarting my computer, but, this did not help.
I had to do another factory reset.
This simply will not do if I have to do a reset everytime I want to start a new family.
I can, I find, enter an existing game. Go to edit town and place a family into a lot, then switch to this household. However, this is not a satisfactory solution as I like to challenge myself with timed games and of course, switching households does not reset the clock.
There has to be a better solution, something I am missing.