My game will no longer change active household in Edit Town

[Caterina]

I have been playing in Sunset Valley for 76 game weeks.  I switch households every three game days.  I was attempting to get to know all of the residents and their houses while completing their lifetime wishes.  Yesterday, when I went into Edit Town mode, I selected the family I wanted to switch to and then tried to continue back to game play.  The control panel still shows the previous household.  Both the new house and old house are open to view but all of the items in the old household are no longer visible.  The in the old household sim can interact with the invisible objects which is a little entertaining.  All this is happening on a brand new laptop with only Base Game installed.  No store content or mods is/are installed.  I tried doing a Factory Reset. 
That didn't help.  I also tried renaming a .backup file and playing.  That did not help either.  This is so frustrating as I still had at least one more rotation through the households to complete my goal.  I wanted to see some of the children, toddlers, and babies age up.  Does anyone know anything that I can do that might help?

[LivvieLove]

Well, this is really a tough one. Would you mind telling me what kind of laptop you run? The basic specs would be great to know at a time like this, though it seems your problem is internal.

I get the feeling you're having issues due to your file size being so large. Normally under those circumstances I would recommend that you take your family and save them and move them to a new town - but obviously I wouldn't do that for your whole town unless it was a last resort. Here are some general maintenance things for games we recommend to long-running saves:
Have you tried deleting the Caches in your The Sims 3 folder? This thread goes into detail on how to keep your game pretty clean and maintained.

Also, this may, or may not help, but when you go into the game and are in a family that works, have you tried "resetSim *" in the cheats command? It will reset everyone in town, so if someone is stuck it will help fix that and keep your game running a little cleaner.

As a complete last resort you can go into Edit Town and save every family you play with to the Family Bin. This will save them with their skills and if you changed their house you can even save them with their house. Go into a new Sunset Valley and remove everyone from their houses (and their houses if you saved families with their houses) and place everyone back in. That should allow you to finish, but it won't be a very pretty set up.
Hopefully some of this helps.    

[Caterina]

Thank you for your response.  I was complaining to my son about my problem and showing him exactly what was going on.  He suggested I try opening up build mode.  When I did that, it opened up the household I was trying to switch to's inventory.  Then, I centered on my active sim and opened build mode again.  That at least brought back that household's items into view.  I saved the game and tried switching to a different  household.  It worked!  It seems I am just unable to switch to the one househould.  Every other one is fine.  I will try resetsim * the next time I play.  Before I try switching to the glitched household.

Thank you again for responding.

[LivvieLove]

Of course! Hopefully all goes well and you won't need to come back but feel free to if the need arises! Sorry I couldn't be more help!