@Judewright - About the black shutting down screen being there for hours, I had that frequently, before any of the recent patches and before I installed any mods. Plus, I don't have Showtime, so it's nothing to do with those things.
Funny thing is, that problem seemed to go away after I got rid of my old massive legacy file. The file was absolutely huge, I can't remember how much exactly but I'm pretty sure it must have been nearly 1GB or something, it was horrendous. So yea, have you got any huge or just multi-generational files hanging around? The number of gens might not even matter, because my legacy file was only on the second gen. I think part of what was making it so big was my huge mansion on a 60X60 lot. Then again, I have a really bad laptop so it could just have been my system and could be an entirely different problem for you, just throwing these suggestions out there.