yeah it has something to do with the adjusting of the scenery objects. my sim gets to 68% while loading then crashes (thank goodness for backups

) i think that some of the textures (being that most are 32bit) don't like the whole not having mip maps part. a while back i tried converting a lot of my textures to 32 bit (in an effort to have crisper textures) and while in the distance they just showed up as water. put them back the way they were and everything looked fine