The Sims 3: Crash on Save

First of all, you should know that I'm running The Sims 3 on a PC with no mods of any kind. I have the following expansions, worlds, and stuff packs installed:

• Seasons
• Pets
• Generations
• World Adventures
• High End Loft Stuff
• Outdoor Living Stuff
• Master Suite Stuff
• Riverview
• Hidden Springs
• Monte Vista

Now onto the point of my post.

After installing Seasons, I tried altering and adding onto a house that was previously on a lot. I added an entire second floor and repurposed several rooms on the first floor to accommodate my growing family. After making the structural changes, I began decorating and adding furniture. After about an hour's worth of work, I clicked back to live and promptly hit "save". Then my game froze. My only error message was that "The Sims 3 has stopped responding". All my work was lost. Frustrating but The Sims is notorious for its crashing clear back to the original game, so I go with the flow and relaunch the game and get right back into building. Again, I make all my changes, go back to live, click "save" and the game crashes AGAIN! Now I'm beyond frustrated and I want to hit something.

At this point, I decide to do a Google search and I get lots of results. Turns out that the problem is directly related to the Seasons expansion and has to do with adding walls when there is snow on the ground. This was the fix that worked for me:

Go into Game Options and turn off the weather effects. Just uncheck the boxes for rain, snow, hail, etc. Wait for the snow to disappear off the ground (or use the in game cheat to manually remove it and I regretfully forget the cheat code to do that). Then build as usual.

Now, I never attempt to build when there is snow on the ground and I haven't had any crashing issues since. Before, it was every single time I tried to save.

I perused many different forums and people have theories that this crash is due to adding walls on a second story. I can't say for sure if that's true. Another solution that I read about was copying the trouble lot to clipboard, bulldozing the lot, delete the empty lot and then placing your saved lot onto another size-appropriate lot. I didn't try this solution because the first one worked just fine for me.

What I find ultimately irritating about this whole situation is that people have been posting about this specific issue for MONTHS now. Why hasn't EA updated with a patch? They seem to have more than enough time and resources to host announcement parties, live online broadcasts, etc. etc. Why not devote some of that energy into fixing what's already out there?? Hmm EA?? AMIRIGHT??