I was tinkering around with Sims2 Clean Installer, and discovered that I have more Lots files in the Neighborhood Lots folder (no, NOT the LotCatalog) than I remember installing. In particular, Lots 297, 298, 299 and 300 all register as "81 Road to Nowhere" - and the first 3 have identical MD5 numbers (298 and 299 show pink for "duplicates").

I don't know what to do about this. Should I just ignore the duplicates, or is it safe to remove them as long as there aren't any Sims living in them? (And how would I find out, since I can't seem to identify where - or if - the lots were actually installed?)

There's no issue with having duplicate lots in the neighborhood, that's just what happens when you place the same lot multiple times. I have no idea what circumstances cause Clean Installer to highlight Neighborhood Lots files as "duplicates", and it's not meant to be used on that folder. Clean Installer is also very bad at identifying files even in Downloads, and IMO should really only be used for installing sims and lots and not for any kind of identification or organization of files on your computer.

That answer is not satisfactory. Soliciting other opinions.

Do you have a recent backup? Would be worth checking to see if the extra files were there too, or whether it's a recent issue. Could be that you have inadvertently drag-dropped some files in your hood folder. If you do have a recent backup that doesn't have the issue, I'd use that.

Otherwise, do the lots appear as part of the hood in SimPE? Each lot in the neighbourhood should have a LTXT as in this image:


If you do not have an LTXT for your extra lots then I would shut SimPE, make a safe backup of the neighbourhood, then remove the duplicate files manually (delete them from the Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods\N00x\Lots folder). You can tell which one the LTXT refers to by looking in the number in brackets after the instance number, for example in my above image the Grocery is 14, so I open the N00x_Lot14.package file and see that this is indeed the Grocery.



Then try loading the hood and see if all of the lots are still there!

Whatever happened, happened on July 30, 2023 and the triplicate lots were represented in every backup since then (drat!). They had no LTXT, so was able to delete them and still have everything working as it should.

I think everything else is more or less accounted for. Wish there were a simple way to get a list of all installed lots in all installed hoods (suggest this to WHoward for a future version of HoodExporter?).

Glad you got that fixed, what a mystery!