Mine always preferred dining tables. I had to put centerpieces on all the tables in the dining room to keep dormies from doing their assignments on them and getting the tables/chairs stuck "in use" all the time.

That's unfortunate. Makes all your tables art exhibits.

I got some "Craftsman" style houses from MTS, and 2 of them had chairs "off the grid". Looks like if tables, chess, or bars are placed off-grid, even though chairs are carefully moved to look like they have been pulled close to the table, Sims can't use them (can't sit in chairs). I would have thought that would not have been an acceptable upload. I've never tried to do that with a chair; can anyone verify this "finding"?

They were just positioned poorly. Chairs can be used off grid in quarter tile increments - just move the chair back a small bit and let it pull itself up to the table when you go live and they'll work. As for what's acceptable or not I don't have a clue but if the furniture is placed poorly enough for you to comment on it leave a message on the upload. If it bothers you maybe it'll bother someone else and they'd appreciate the information.

Thanks. I guess the table (& then the chairs) were not positioned correctly.

My experience with this:

I wanted to fuss with customer numbers on an owned lot. (Specifically, I wanted more customers on a townie-owned community lot that I never played as an owned lot, so that I could visit it and have more fellow visitors to interact with than the 3 visitors allowed a Level-0 owned business.) What I found was that the adjuster...didn't really work. (And I tested in a neighborhood with no other mods/cc installed, so it wasn't a conflict with anything.) With owned lots, the number of customers is limited by the business's level and I could find no mod that would actually override this. It didn't matter if I put in different limits in a userstartup file or if I used the SimWardrobe object or whatever. SnootySims used to have info about those limits, but the site is apparently down right now and I can't access it. But I think it's something like 3 customers (not including the owner/employees) for a Level 0 business and each successive level gives you one or two more customers. I think the limit for a Level 10 business is 15, but don't quote me on that. (Which, yes, is problematic on a 1x1 lot and your system is strong enough -- and I know yours is, Jo -- to allow 15 customers plus owner/employees on the lot at once. )

So, the best I could do in my situation was to artificially inflate my townie-owned community lots' level to 10. (Via this mod: http://insimenator.org/showthread.p...ustomer+loyalty) That way, I had more fellow customers to interact with when I visited that lot. If on the other hand you wanted to reduce the number of customers because you simply can't fit them on the lot, you could use that mod to take away loyalty stars from customers, which would knock down the business's level and thus reduce the number of customers it will "call." But of course you wouldn't want to do that if a business's level is important to you in whatever way. And, of course, there's nothing stopping that business's level going up again, so you'd constantly have to take away stars. (In this case, a "Business Level Stopinator" would be really good. ) But yeah, SimWardrobe's adjuster didn't work for what I wanted to do, either. Given what I read about an owned business lot's level dictating how many customers it can have, I'm not sure it CAN work on owned lots. I mean, even when I set the number as less than what it could get because of the business's level, I still got the level-tied number of customers, so the adjuster doesn't seem to override the level-tied customer numbers for owned lots at all, and I suspect it will only work on unowned lots.

long ago downloaded Numenor's transparency set ( http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=70222 ). placed all of them in Downloads folder.
last I checked, the fences in the set did not have the custom content icon in catalog. is this normal?

Not at all. Centerpieces don't interfere with sims eating at the tables, but they are prevented from doing assignments on the tables. See the picture in the following post. It's a little hard to see, but the dormie in the back is having no trouble at all eating his breakfast off of a table with centerpieces on it.
https://www.modthesims.info/showthr...004#post5113004

I don't have much of a problem with class assignments anymore anyway since I got the following two mods:

1. noassignmentlitter by Pescado - if a dormie abandons their assignment book, the book will evaporate shortly afterward. No more assignment books all over every available floor tile, desk, table, etc.! This mod is only available in the Director's Cut. Pick the EP folder for your version of the game and get the large .zip file at the bottom of the page. noassignmentlitter should be in there.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/

2. nopartyassignment by Syberspunk - this restricts when and where dormies are allowed to do their assignments in the first place. Now they can be interacted with instead of always being busy doing assignments! Once a dormie fills their grade meter, they stop doing assignments at all!
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,2419.0.html

Syberspunk's nopartyresearch is similar, but works on group research instead. - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...ic,11553.0.html

Does anybody else have problems with custom cars becoming unclickable? I've had my Sims become trapped on community lots for this reason.