Okay, here's a new question. I've been playing the Sims 2 happily for 2 days on my grandfather's computer. (BTW, This game is definitely worth trouble, it is awesome.) However, this morning my grandfather successfully got rid of some DLL files associated with his old graphics card which had long since been gone. Now the Sims 2 gives me this same menacing error everyone's having trouble with. We've downloaded every driver update for the GeForce 5200. It won't help. But it isn't our card because I've been playing the game already! We've done nothing to the card, just deleted those old DLL files.
Please help. I've got Sims trapped in the game. 
_______________________________________________________
Edit: We've fixed the problem. It may have been a problem unique to our PC, but just in case this is someone else's problem, too....
I went to The Sims 2 > Support > EasyInfo.exe
[The Sims 2 Folder is usually in C:\Program Files\EA Games]
EasyInfo gives you an overview of the things you need to run Sims 2, and whether or not you have them all. The green checkmarks and the red X tell you what you need to improve on your computer. Our problem was the Display Memory was set at 0.0 and the game needs 32.0. Thus, there was a red X. :suspiciou
I told my grandfather and I think he went into some DOS function to set the display card to what it's memory should be (128.0). Now the Sims 2 works as well as ever. If anyone else has this problem, let me know. I can probably get him to explain how he change the settings in detail.
