Into the Future troubles

I can't get a screenshot of what's happening, so I hope I can properly explain the issue I'm having. 

With all content up to Island Paradise, my game was working fine. Yesterday I installed Into the Future and found that:

1. The Sims 3 desktop icon shows up as the Windows default icon for a missing shortcut, despite pointing to the correct directory.
2. When loading the game, the loading screen is black (i.e. no "Into the Future" background) and the loading text was smeared. 
3. When on the game main menu, the buttons have no text at all. (This isn't a language setting issue; the language registry fix was the first fix I tried). 

I have followed the steps in the "how to install Sims 3" post to the letter and, as I said before, the game was working wonderfully as of the Island Paradise expansion. I have uninstalled everything (three times, in fact) and did a fresh install, again following the directions in the "how to" post to the letter. This strange problem still persists. I have no CC, no mods, and I haven't even bothered to re-install the Stuff packs yet. I have no idea what's happening or how to fix it and after an extensive Google search, I can't seem to find anyone else who is having the same issue. If anyone has any suggestions, I would be most appreciative. 

Thank you!

Hello!

Please go here and redownload the Ultimate Fix.  Once you do, please follow steps 2 through 5 once again. 

Let us know if this helps.

It did not help, however, I was able to figure out the problem! 

I am running an Nvidia GeForce GTS 450. It would seem that my drivers auto-updated themselves to the most recent patch (28 October, version 331.65) which is usually a good thing. This time, however, it was a very bad thing. The 28 October drivers won't support any cards below 560. I had to rollback my drivers to the 25 March patch (version 314.22) to get things working again. 

If anyone else has an Nvidia and experiences similar issues, they may want to double-check their driver version. 

Thank you for the swift reply and your patience. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.