Don't forget, a game is far more taxing on hardware than a movie. Movies are made of linear audio and video tracks, so you never get errors or hardware problems with those unless they're recorded in a format you don't have the codec for. All the sounds are compressed into one long "song" and played alongside the images. Sims and games are basically what graphics and sound cards exist for, and any driver issues will almost always arise with those as opposed to anything else. They all work differently with their own library of hundreds of files and code, and it's very easy to either purposefully or inadvertently screw up its stability.
Really though it doesn't sound like drivers. It is odd that reinstalling doesn't fix it though. Just some good practice with a computer that runs demanding things like this is to defragment around once a month and be careful when changing or deleting game files. Most games will cough and die if they notice one changed item that isn't done by a modder who knows what he's doing, but that doesn't matter here since you have your cd's and can reinstall.
If you're not that experienced with modern sims and games on a PC you're lucky, it's a constant battle between man and machine to make them all work to your taste/at all.
