Gustav Von Vader

like all politics, i feel this probably has more to do with money than concern for the greater good. i do take issue with the claim that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death. setting aside problems related to obesity, i wonder how the stats for vehicular fatalities stack up. heck, it might only take fatalities from dui (or dwi depending on where ya live) to outnumber the "reported" number of cigarette deaths. i say reported, because if a person works around asbestos, or in a clean room, or even near that foul roofing tar, and also smokes a pack a day, i am sure only the cigarettes were to blame. upwards of 70% of the purchase price of cigarettes is tax- seems like maybe smokers should be given free health care, eh? smokers medicare (rolling eyes)

what a weird bug. it's fixed now, but i have no idea how. after taking a 2 week or so break, i was delighted to find everything back to normal upon my last session. about the only thing different (other then the date) was a thorough cleaning of the inside of my tower. no attempts to debug in the interim. again, many thanks to all respondents- i only wish i had a conclusive fix to share. ps- sam, i am very interested in understanding about modifying things like the command line. i have no idea about the "intro smiley ff," at the end of the instructions. im pretty tech ignorant, but i try to be an attentive student. thank you for your help.

thank you all for the responses, and particularly to platyfish for bailing me out of looking like a crazy person talking to myself. i apologize for not listing my specs in the initial post- bad etiquette, but i was hoping it was an easy, generic fix. i have sc4 deluxe running on windows xp using a 2.8 ghz single processor with over a gig ram. i am fully up to date with my nvidia drivers for my geforce 5700le, 256mb card. by no means a race car, but it was nice when i bought it a few years ago. the part that gets me is i have never had a problem like this for the almost 3 years i have been playing the same copy on the same machine. as far as hacking, i have learned more about that from you great folks on this board then i ever tried on my own, but i am confident i have not altered any command lines since i have not downloaded/ installed anything recently. i think captcity maybe on to something with the startup programs. i have a mcafee bundle that, on occasion, attempts a coup for control of my desktop. the worst part is i am unable to uninstall the mcafee junk- even after a somewhat recent reformat. i just cant seem to isolate what is different now then before this problem began. again, thanks to all the respondents, and any further brainstorming is greatly appreciated.

after trying everything else, i did indeed remove and reinstall my copy. this also did not help, but i suppose it was good to clean up my plugin folder. "nuke the whole site from orbit- it's the only way to be sure." aside from the frustration of the time wasted, not being able to alter the ui translucency results in inaccurate placement of civic buildings with a radius. so, do i get a prize for stumping the band? very odd indeed....

**bump** none of the wonderful contributors to simtropolis has had this happen? maybe im not explaining enough? basically, every time i load the game it resets to the default settings and region (timbuktu)

anyone have this happen? game plays fine, just annoying to load your region and reset stuff like texture detail to start every session. searching past posts, i deleted all recent downloads to clear dependencies and rebooted a few times. still no luck. thanks in advance.