TS2 Legacy: Infinite loading or game crashes/closes loading ANY family or CAS.

To preface, I have read all the TS2 Legacy threads/posts, and have not come across anyone else experiencing this problem as of yet.

As mentioned in the title, I cannot load any family or CAS at all. I haven't been able to since I bought the game on 4/28/25. I spent all day the first day I purchased The Sims 2 Legacy attempting to play. I have yet to see a single live sim on my screen. I load the game up, the intro animation plays, I can select a neighborhood, the neighborhood animation plays, I select a premade family and press play or click on CAS. The loading screen either loads for hours, or after a minute or so, the window closes the entire game with no error message.

I have other games installed on an external hard drive and initially installed TS2 Legacy on it as well. But the loading screen problem quickly became apparent and I immediately tried uninstalling, deleting all game files, and reinstalling on my regular C drive. On a fresh C-drive install, I still cannot play at all. The problem is exactly the same. I'm at the point where I'm tempted to just get a refund and play the CD version on my old 2008 era laptop.

I have tried loading an unoccupied lot/house and that DOES work. I did this and turned off my shadows, and lowered all the graphics settings in-game. After saving and trying to load a family again, the problem remains. I have went into the properties of the .exe, set it to always run as admin, tried playing around with different compatibilities, uninstalled and reinstalled more times than I can count. Nothing works. 

I'd like to note this is a totally naked, CC/download and mod-free game.

For what it's worth, specs are below in case I'm missing something glaringly obvious, which I hope is the case as opposed to paying for a broken version of a game that I already owned for 15 years. 

Windows 11 64-bit OS
AMD Ryzen 5 3550H with Radeon Vega Mobile gfx 2.10 GHz
8GB RAM
4GB graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 & AMD Radeon Vega 8)

I'd also like to add I can run various other games with no issues, a CC-full TS4 and Dragon Age series for example. 

Any help/ideas/fixes are appreciated.