Game Help:Vanishing Menus

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Menus Vanish As Soon As They Appear

  • Pie menus in-game vanish as soon as they appear, or vanish too quickly to be usable.

Are You Using A Dell Laptop?

More specifically, are you using a Dell Inspiron 1501?

Yes!

There is an issue with the drivers on Dell Inspiron 1501 laptops which causes the vanishing menus bug. Windows released an update at some point which broke the Inspiron's touchpad drivers - to fix this, you need to reinstall the working drivers. You can download these from Dell's website. Once they're installed, restart the laptop, and the problem should be fixed.

No, I need other solutions...

Change Touchpad/Mouse

If your mouse or touchpad is overly sensitive, the game could be registering two clicks when you actually only clicked once. This can also be caused by slightly damaged ports. As such, if you are using a laptop touchpad, try using a mouse; or if you are already using a mouse, try a different mouse. Also try plugging your mouse into a different port - either a different USB port, or a different type of port using a USB-PS/2 adaptor.

Change Keyboard

Similarly, keyboards can send "phantom keystrokes" to the game, which cancel the menus. Again, plug in a different keyboard, and try plugging it into different ports.

Turn Off Mouse Programs

If your mouse was an expensive programmable mouse, it might be running its own program which is interfering - check your system tray (the bit of your taskbar which displays the time) for anything like this, and if you find it, right-click it and disable or exit. You may also be running extra mouse related programs in the background. These extra programs can be uninstalled normally, through Add/Remove programs feature of Windows.

Change Mouse Settings

Go to Control Panel -> Mouse, and try turning down settings like doubleclick speed, and pointer speed.

Drivers

You may have a driver installed which is causing this issue - the driver is the program which tells Windows what your keyboard and mouse are doing, so if the driver isn't working correctly, it could easily cause this issue. Almost all mice are plug-n-play, meaning they do not require you to install any drivers to use them. If your mouse came with a CD it probably just contains optional programs, and these programs can actually conflict and cause problems with The Sims games. Do not install this additional software. If you're using a laptop touchpad, go to the laptop manufacturer's website - use Google to find it - and download the drivers from there.

Change User Accounts

It's possible that a setting on your Windows user account is causing the issue - try playing on a different user account, or making a new one. If it works on another account, you can try to find out what setting is causing the issue on your normal account - but there are so many possible culprits, it's much easier to just keep playing on the new account. You can transfer your save files to the new account by copying Documents and Settings\OldAccount\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 to Documents and Settings\NewAccount\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2.

If you do not want to switch accounts, try using msconfig to disable all unnecessary background processes.

Credits

Info in this FAQ from Callistra, whiterider, simsample, purplemer3, and lilah012.

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Sims 2 Game Help Categories:

Custom Content  | Expansion Packs  | Installation  | Gameplay Guides  | Technical & Graphics Issues  | Body Shop & Homecrafter  | Miscellaneous Issues  | FAQ Index

MTS's Sims 2 Q&A Help Forums

Search: 

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