This weird bug began yesterday: once my sim uses the dryer, the dryer sounds start looping, and the game won't play any sound except for the dryer, over and over again. When I've had the bug with the continuous cell phone ring, I'm able to use Debug Enabler to create an incoming call, have my sim answer the phone, and then the ringing stops. I can't find anything similar for the looping dryer sound. I tried resetting the dryer, resetting the lot, and resetting the town, but it's still going. It seems the only way to stop it is to quit the game and then restart. Any ideas?

Did you also try to delete the dryer and replace it with a new one?

Maybe it stops then
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Embarrassingly, I hadn't tried that, so I just did. The sound is still going. I'll try some combinations of deleting, rebuying, resetting, and restarting. Something is bound to work eventually.

Update: Re-deleted the washer and dryer, and reset the lot. No change. Then I left the game paused for several minutes while I played with my dog. The good news is that the dryer sound finally stopped! Unfortunately none of the other sounds have resumed yet. They will soon, hopefully.

What if you change to edit town make a save as - quit game and restart and go to play mode again.

Also delete all cache files in your document sims 3 folder befor restarting.

Did you install any new mods recently?

So I deleted the sim's washer and dryer, removed Simler's core mod (replaced with SP because I like it better and it's less of a resource hog than Simler's mod), and started again. This time all the sound randomly stopped after a few sim hours of playing. When I pause the game, after awhile the sound will resume for a moment, like it's trying to catch up, and then go silent again. I'm trying to figure out whether my sim performing a specific action is causing the issue or if it's something else. As far as I can tell, the game isn't generating any script errors related to this.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also deleted the cache files before I started the game.

hm, read this thread about mod combination incompatibilities including simlers mod
announcements/topic11969

Ah, thank you! The sound looping seems to be fixing itself, now that I've booted up the game a couple of times without Simler's mod. The weirdest thing that happened after I took out the mod was that all of the townies suddenly had new names. Odd bug.