Sims 3 (app already running)

[Finixfire]

I have been playing the game for a while and after I installed supernatural and did edit town,I tried saving and exiting to which it crashed after while. I tried opening it again in steam but it tells me that the app is already running.
I can't close it through steam which is infuriating.

I have already tried many solutions for it:
-Reinstalling the game cache
-Trying to close it in Task Manager(I can't find sims3 running in it)
I have also tried ending the Steam process and running it again but it doesn't work and still gives me the same problem

I have sort out on forums but can't find the solution,and mine is a parallels desktop which is a little confusing to work with.
I can still access it through a folder but I want to download the new expansions but I can't do it with the game still running.

SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!D:

[bogusmax]

I have this problem too it sucks :(

[Kiya]

If you have not already done so, try restarting your PC - don't just hit the restart button, completely switch your PC off and leave it off for a few minutes before restarting.

[Finixfire]

So far,the method that helped me to stop the issue was to reinstall the the steam along with the sims in the 'control panel' where I go into the uninstall option. When I reinstalled it I was able to update the expansions I wanted to add. It wasn't a long term solution but I still managed to add on the expansions I wanted and play them. The second one I tried was transferring more disk space from my mac into the windows, as mentioned before I have 'Parrallels'. I think switching my virtual machine off was part of the reason that got it to work as mention by Kiya, but it was also a process I needed to successfully transfer the disk space. When my windows had a significant amount of space,I stopped having the 'steam app running' error. I hope this helps whoever that has the same/similar issue.

[Grammi]

OK, I found a solution on PC. Go to Task Manager, Procecess and find something along the lines of Sims launcher.

[Emma]

I realize this is a really old thread, however I think the problem it describes is worth discussing a better solution than to those that were presented for it.

I had a problem with another game, not Sims 3, that was on Steam, where Steam absolutely refused to let the game launch, insisting it was already running even though it definitely was not. Even after checking the task manager and restarting.

Something with Steam itself got corrupt. Which is why reinstalling Steam fixed it. But you can usually bypass this in another way without reinstalling Steam. The problem is that files that Steam uses for whatever reason get locked out to it so it can't edit them, and a game is still flagged as running in those files whether or not it actually is. How I fixed it was going to where I have Steam installed and actually setting the Steam.exe itself to run as administrator.

1. Completely shut down Steam first before you do anything.
   
2. Go to where you have Steam installed and find Steam.exe.
   
3. Right click it to get to the context menu and go to properties. In there, go to the compatiblity tab and click on the check box that says "run as administrator" and click OK.
   
4. Restart Steam and ignore the warning message it gives you. It's lying to you. It's talking about compatiblity modes, like "run in Windows XP compatiblity mode" and it can't tell the difference between one of those being set and run as administrator being set, which is fine. So just click the box to never show you that message again.
   
5. Try running the game again and it should run.

This is a much less drastic solution to the problem than reinstalling Steam. And you can do it anyway to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

[Rosemarystar]

In the bottom right corner of the task bar is a triangle symbol that when you hover mouse over says shows hidden icons. Click that and small window pop-ups above and in that list is the sims 3 launcher icon. Double clicking it will have the sims 3 launcher pull up. Right click this icon and chose close to close the sims 3 app. Now you can shutdown your computer or start the game again if you close sims launcher.

[Cythil]

This is actually due to it adding a luncher to the background program tab. Something hard to notice as almost no program does that. The Sims 3 has a bit of a antiquated way of doing thing. And even back then it would be a bit of a oddity.

You can access the luncher from there and start up the programe. Or close down the luncher. That way you do not need to go in to the ask manager.

There is absolutely no need to reinstall The Sims 3 or Steam or restart Steam.

[Iateyoface9d7n]

Resurrecting the dead again here, but:

>Open task manager
>Click "More Details" in the bottom left
+Click "Options" in the top and then "Always on Top". This should genuinely be a default options because some programs don't like Task Manager (Skyrim, a lot of fullscreen ones, etc.)
>If it isn't in "Apps", go to the "Details" tab and look for something "Sims" related. It will have the icon and for 3 I believe it's called "Sime3LauncherW.exe"
>Right click and hit "End Task"

Every time I close out Sims 3, I have to go to Task Manager anyways and kill it's background process because EA is being EA