This is a short explanation of a "fix" discovered by the user community for people for whom Homecrafter Plus has ceased to work when they come to reinstall.
The version of Homecrafter Plus hosted on the Sims 2 website, and many other places on the Net, has some issues on PCs with XP and Vista - not surprisingly as it apparently has never been updated to run with these operating systems.
Some Simmers find that, particularly with later expansion packs, it either simply will not load at all, dropping out of the Task Manager as if it had never existed, or that it refuses to save the walls and floors once created, giving a nonsensical error such as "Not enough disk space to save the wall" - even on a system with 47% space free on the drive, like mine! (And the EA suggestion of changing read-only files to readable doesn't work...)
Complaints to EA led to the comment that they do not provide any support for these programs even though available on their site. Though there is actually an information page about HomeCrafter now at http://thesims2.ea.com/help/detail.php?help_id=165 but I can't actually find the download itself. Maybe they have realized it is problematic. If you cannot find it anywhere else, here is my old download file, which is a self-installer TS2HomeCrafterPlus_Install.exe. Run this first.
While walls and floors can be made with SimPE, I personally I find SimPE incredibly difficult to use, and the solution which was discovered and provided by IssaNet on Mod the Sims 2 here was to use a later (2006 but not hosted on the EA webpage now) version of the Homecrafter EXE.
This should only be attempted if you know your way around the filesystem in your computer.
You can download the file, below. Once you open the RAR file, extract the EXE inside to overwrite the older one located at C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 HomeCrafter Plus\HCBin
For me at least, this solution gives me Homecrafter Plus, in the directory of my current Sims 2 game as it used to, and it fires up and works very well. I hope it will for you too.
I decided to host the file here as it can be very hard tunnelling through bulletin board posts, and some BBS have a tendency to lose files. So here it is.
If you need it as a zip file please contact me
Happy Walling and Flooring!
Sita 19 08 08