Disappearing Sims following first game save after 1.67 update. [SOLVED]

Hi,

I had a mountain of trouble trying to update to update to 1.67. I applied the ultimate fix 3 or 4 times plus the 1.67 manual patch (and also tried updating through the Sims Launcher). Nothing was working, it always resulted in the Sims crashing after notifying me that I was playing an unofficial version of the game. After finding a fix for this on Games4theworld (thank you!), I resolved it by deleting the couple of mods I had plus another .package file. However, after a couple of hours of playing as seamlessly as I'm used to (not 100% but it's working and that's enough for me), I saved. And then everything went downhill  I'm now experiencing the disappearance of my sims. I can make them appear and disappear at will by asking them to do something (so, for example, if I direct them somewhere, they appear but they do not complete the task, it disappears from the queue and they just stand there. If I click it again, they disappear and so does the task in the queue and so on...). 

I have no mods, as I deleted them all to get the game up and running following the 1.67 update. I've made no program changes, bar the game save, since applying the ultimate fix. 

Also, second question (but slightly less important at this stage, since if my sims are invisible and I can't interact with them, there's little point installing another expansion lol). I have downloaded Island Paradise. When I install this expansion, do I need to re-apply the ultimate fix and the manual patch from scratch? Or could I, for example, just drop and drag the two files from the generations-onwards folder into the Sims 3 Base/Game/Bin folder? 

Can anyone help me? Any help is appreciated! Thank you!

Thank you very much, that did the job. I didn't realise the scriptCache.package was re-created each game  And great, thank you, I'm going to attempt to install them now. Fingers crossed it all works  Thanks for your help!

I've installed the expansions and it's working great, thank you very much! And yes, but it's a download support question, so I've posted it in the other forum  Thanks!