Crashing Issues

Hopefully I will be able to describe the issues I'm having clearly here.  lol  I'm having some serious crashing issues with the Sims 3.  I've downloaded and installed the base game and all expansions/stuff packs from G4TW.  The installation was the easy part. 

I manually installed the 1.3GB Sims 3 patch.  After doing this, I was able to install Island Paradise.  Before installing the patch, Island Paradise could not get past the "update" screen at start-up.

Then the problems started.

I kept getting an "unofficial content" error message which gave me two options:  quit or continue and risk game crashes.  And game crashes I did get!

I did a search on the forums here for this problem and found a thread that suggested using the Ultimate Fix.  I went through the procedures listed in the PDF for the Ultimate Fix.  When I open the launcher as part of the process for installing the Ultimate Fix, some of the expansions are greyed out and it told me the game was already up to date and didn't give me the option to "refresh".  After copying the Ultimate Fix files over, the "unofficial content" error was gone but I am still getting frequent game crashes.  I cannot play the game longer than a few minutes before it dumps me back to my desktop.

I've already completely uninstalled and re-installed the game once today.  Am I going to have to go through that procedure again?  My game was working fine until I tried to install Island Paradise (and kept getting the error that the install program could not update the game) and the 1.3GB Sims 3 patch.

This is extremely frustrating and I'm really hoping someone here will know what this problem is and be able to help me get it solved.