Thanks for the sympathy, I hope so too. I'm thinking and hoping it was just that the save went somehow wrong and everything will be okay once I replay the semester. At the moment things are looking a bit better, my game loads, there are no flashing items, and I got the gossip cleared. Now I'm re-loading after the first round of HoodReplace, so so far so good. *crosses fingers*

Ah, and apparently Doc just beat me to your gossip question. :) (The batbox told me that it had nuked over 22,000 gossip memories, so I suppose it was about time.)