Eggplant Bush & Lemon Tree Not Working

Right, so, downloaded Monte Vista and the Al Fresco Market from G4TW, because you guys are the greatest when it comes to high-quality downloads and game support. Everything is running just fine, no bugs or problems, except... no eggplant bush or lemon tree. Well, correction: no working eggplant bush and lemon tree. I can get the auto-soils from bugdebug, but they're just dirt. They don't work.

My games are all installed following the directions from you guys, I've got the Ultimate Fix and am patched to 1.42. I've tried the soils in several saved games, and a clean town in case my saves were corrupted, no luck. Tried taking out all my mods and CC, no luck. I've got the latest Store Fix from the Mediafire account, so not quite sure what's causing the problem. Oh, and I'm on Windows Vista

I know I'm not the only one with this problem (though it doesn't seem too common), b/c I've seen this discussed on the Sims 3 forums. But we all know how great EA is with customer support and bug help...

Yep, it is.

UPDATE: Lemons showed up in the market stall from the Al Fresco market finally, after my sim planted one the auto-soils suddenly started working. I have NO IDEA why. But hey, at least they're working

COMPLETE FRESH INSTALL - MANY TIMES. CCmerge is in dcbackup. Tried Monte Vista and other worlds, currently trying Sunlit Tides. Game KEEPS crashing after less than 20 minutes of game play EVERY single time. I am constantly losing all my work. No mods (tried them on other installs and didn't help.) No CC.
Running Windows 7, Intel Core Duo, 4g Ram, Mobile Intel 4 - all Sims 3 games installed. Have everything set to low as far as detail, etc. Latest updates and fixes...installed according to your instructions.
Here are the issues:
Al Fresco Market - Finally got tables & stands to show up but NO LEMONS and NO EGGPLANT in store, market, etc. I can do auto-soil with cheat but it just shows something planted but doesn't grow and not able to do anything with it. I've tried even having children in the household of different ages through teens and that didn't help either.
Game keeps crashing randomly in less than 20 minute increments causing me to continually lose all my work. During this it just freezes. I can't do anything. I have to click ctrl-alt-delete and then it brings up that the game is not working and has to close or something like that. Don't recall the exact error message.
Can't get rid of zombies despite cheat. I've even tried changing moon settings - they keep killing my garden.
With and without Winter option, my plants keep going into hibernation during spring, summer, etc. I can never harvest. Very frustrating because all my plants are perfect.