Sims 2 Legacy - Jarring Freezing

Title. Game ran fine at first, crashed once after creating family with the often reported error that happens during loading screen.

Played several hours no biggie, but now once my Sim was returning from the store she had purchased, the game started hitching really hard and now even after restarting, the game is mostly frozen, unfreezes for 2-3 seconds and fully freezes again.