Game crash "the application has crashed."

Mine too, I try to create a household or play an existing household and it will give me the same error message. 

I am having the exact same issue. I cannot use Create a Family or play any of the premade families. Is there a way to fix this?

Similar issues here.  I was able to go into an empty home, modify the structure and contents, save it, and return to the neighborhood.  I was also able to create a new Sim.  However, as soon as I selected a house with Sims inside or took a homeless Sims family and moved them into an empty home, the loading screen would come up and soon after, I got the same crash message.  I've been having that same problem on my original CDs and DVD I've had for over 20 years... I have lots of old game files I have been hauling around from PC to PC, hoping They would come up with an anniversary edition patched for Win 11 that would just work... my have I forgotten my history with the Sims 2...  Hopefully, the support folks will come up with a patch for the Sims 2 Legacy Collection.  It used to take me days to install one CD at a time and enter that damned code on the box... thank goodness I still have all of them.  But now, I got one installation, no CDs to worry about... it should have worked, by Jove...

I am having the same issue! It is completely unplayable and I have tried everything to resetting my whole laptop and redownloading the game.