I asked this over at the SimPE forums and got directed here instead, so hope this is OK.

I'm making a genderswapped uberhood using Tarlia's cleaned up templates and all went well until I tried to change Contessa Capp's name to Conte. First, SimPE gave me the error message "Unable to change the Sim Name". Then I noticed I had about five Unknown's in the Sim Description list. I ignored them for a few days until today, when I hopefully tried changing Contessa's name again. Suddenly the number of Unknown's doubled and when I clicked on them, they all had the name Conte.

So question one, what the heck do I do with all these Unknowns? I've backed up and deleted them with Theo's deleter, but can anyone verify if that's actually safe, or should I go back to my backup and deal with them in another way? And secondly, does anyone why this problem happened? I did eventually manage to change the name altering the catalgue description in the character data, but I'd like to know why it happened so I can avoid it in future.

Did you change the name in the Sim Description record in the neighborhood package, or somewhere else?

Did the Unknowns show up while you were using SimPE, or did they occur after playing the game? Do you have any CC which might be creating sims in your neighborhood space? If so, then those Unknowns may be valid. As far as I know, SimPE doesn't look for user data inside of CC; you'll have to look yourself.

I've never seen that error, but I would recommend that you go back to your backup. I've never had problems changing a name in the Sim Description. The fact that SimPE started renaming Unknowns doesn't sound good though. It sounds like SimPE is very confused.

If SimPE continues to have problems with that sim, you might want to consider changing the name in-game. I know that there are several mods available which can do that.

Yeah, I tried changing her name in the Sim Description record first, which is where I'd been changing everyone else's names. I did try using the Simblender to change the name, but as she's a dead sim, her name didn't appear in the list to be changed. However, once I changed her name in the character data, she shows up in the Sim Description list with the new name, so that does seem to have got around that problem, so if I do have to roll back, I can at least deal with that issue.

As for the Unknowns, I'm pretty sure they showed up while I was using SimPE, but I'm not certain. I remove all CC except for the SimBlender, Batbox and the Gussy-up plugin when I test this hood, so I doubt it's a CC issue. But I could test if you like by making a backup of my backup and then seeing what happens when I try to change the name in the Sim Description. But I should probably mention that after posting this, I clicked on a few other completely different sims, who all had the same name too, so in a panic I closed SimPE and when I looked again, everyone had their names back and all my Unknowns were Unknown again.