"A Serious Error Has Occurred"

[imaGleek]

I was loading my game file for the Max Skills Marathon Challenge and a pop up came up that said:

A serious error has occured while loading 'Max Skills Marathon.sims3' It is strongly recommended that you restart the application.

So, I quit the game and restarted only to find that the message came up again. What does this mean?

[Noodles]

I've had this happen to one of my games. The game crashed while saving and it completely messed up my save file. The family did show in the menu as usual but when I tried to load it I got that same message. And re-starting the game didn't help at all.
Has anything unusual happened to your game while saving / shutting the game?

You might want to restore your backup. (there are intructions in a sticky here on Technical board...) I must mention tho that when this happened to me, even the backup file had become unusable. I don't know how it messed everything...

[imaGleek]

Yeah, my game crashed and when I restarted my computer and the game it was like that. I tried to follow the instructions in that thread, but I just made it worse because when I restarted the game it wouldn't let me load the game and it said something about expansion packs not being compatible, so I just deleted it. The worst part was, it was my challenge file so I just have to see from Metro as what I should so, because I didn't even play for that long, I was still on week one.

[rodney27]

ive had this problem too. my sims worked fine when all i had was the base game. no updates or anything. and it still does but as soon as update the game from the launcher like it tells me too. i can load that game once and then as soon as i save and quit i can never load the game again. i click on it in the menu and halfway through loading it says "A serious error has occured while loading 'sunset valley. sims3'it is strongly recommended that you restart the application". this also happened when i tried to install ambitions. my old sims worked fine but in order to install ambitions i had to update. then as soon as i updated i could load it once but never again after that? any help would be great

[xFezIsAFreakx]

Your file is corrupted and unless you have a backup for it, that's the end of that file. Sorry. I had this happen to my very first ever game and legacy attempt.

You could try the instructions here but I doubt it will work. It never worked for me or Noodles, as mentioned in their post above, so you'll be really lucky if it works for you but hey, it's worth a try!

[rodney27]

thanks but it didnt work ive tried reinstalling everything and it still happens so it doesnt matter about losing my saves as there gone. i just want to be able to play the sims with the expansions ive got without getting that notification.