Sims 3 crashes going to main menu

AlHollandiyah​  Thanks for the dxdiag and for trying so many things already.  One other troubleshooting step to try is to launch the game with your computer offline.  You can sign into the EA App and put it in offline mode, then disable wifi and/or disconnect the ethernet cable before pressing Play.

If that doesn't work, I'd need to see what error the game is throwing when it crashes.  Somehow your dxdiag doesn't list any errors at all, which is unusual.  Do you use a cleaner app or another tool that would be deleting temp files?  That could include crash logs.  If you do have such a tool, please remove or disable it while we're troubleshoting, since that info may well be necessary.

If the game crashes while your computer is offline, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor.  Click Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day.  Today is on the right.

Look for an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent Sims 3 crash.  If you find one, double-click it to see more details, then copy that info and paste it into a reply here.  If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.

Thank you very much for your fast reply! I did some testing, first I set EA to offline and my PC to airplane mode, which I think that was far easier then disabling wifi and diving behind my pc to get to the cable. I also deliberately did not log in to the game launcher. The game worked fine! Then I tested it with internet back on (airplane mode off) and EA back online, but without logging in. Again, it worked fine.

Then I logged in and loaded a fresh save again. And came face to face with another bug that has been plaguing me for weeks now, that you choose a household or place a household, click the check mark, and...... nothing. Just a gray check mark, no gameplay. I tried all the tips for getting that to work, like going to edit town and moving in and out households, but just like the other occurrences this week it just wouldn't budge.

Something else I noticed yesterday: I have a habit of cleaning out my game folder after closing it, the package files, the mymailaddress.bin file and the likes. Normally if I remove the mymailaddress.bin file and wait a bit and load up the launcher I'd have to log back in. But today even after clearing it out yesterday evening it still showed my address and that I was logged in!

Does TS3 keep shadow copies of your login somewhere outside of The Sims 3 folder? Because how else can it still know if the bin file has been removed over 12 hours prior? And is there any way to get playing my account working again? Thank you very much!

AlHollandiyah​  At the moment, does the gray check mark issue happen if your computer is offline?  And yes, airplane mode is fine.  You could also disconnect from the wifi network you normally use; I think it shouldn't reconnect automatically until you restart or sleep/wake the computer.

If being offline doesn't help, please try yet another clean folder, still in offline mode.  If that doesn't help either, let me know whether your user folder is inside OneDrive.  It would just say Documents etc. in certain contexts, but you can right-click the Sims 3 folder and select Properties > General to see the Location.

For the login info, I haven't tested in Windows in a long time.  But the info does get preserved in macOS, in Keychain Access, which is where password-related info is stored; and I remember that a few years ago at least, clearing Internet Explorer data wiped the record of what packs had been selected in a 1.69 install.  So Edge's IE-mode data is where I'd look next.

I agree that wifi probably won't re-enable itself, but I usually connect to internet by cable as I find it much more stable. That aside, the gray check mark and the crashing instead of main menu are both gone if I do not log in to The Sims 3, so no need for disabling internet on top of that.

Cleaning the folder doesn't make any difference, the only thing that works is not logging in. As for One Drive, I don't have it installed (I always remove it) so I am 100% sure that folder isn't in there, it is in my documents in the Electronic Arts folder. I don't know of any Keychain related function in Windows that I use, and if offered I always decline saving passwords in preference of typing.

Currently it is no longer possible to clear Internet Explorer data as Microsoft has practically removed IE from being accessible, even if you find it in your starting menu it will simply open Edge instead. And clearing out Edge (both browsing data and settings since I don't use it anyway) doesn't make a difference either.

However, when I logged out it stayed logged out, so there's that! Now I am just wondering what happened to being logged in that worked reasonably one day (except sometimes giving gray check marks) and turned into crashes the next day, without anything in between! Is there any solution other then permanently not logging in as a workaround? I am afraid there isn't but maybe you know something I can still try? Thank you very much!

AlHollandiyah​  I just mentioned Keychain Access in macOS to point out that the info is stored somewhere other than the [your email].bin file in that OS, which means it's probably stored somewhere else in Windows too.  I realize that Explorer isn't a thing anymore, and in fact a few other players have had trouble clearing the related data.  This thread is about a different error, but the steps the OP lists in their reply might help:

400 - Bad Request | EA Forums - 13121426

I do think it's possible that clearing all this data will prevent the crashing, that is if the problem is corrupt data rather than something else with the connection.  If you clear everything and get another crash, I'd like to see the related Reliability Monitor info I mentioned before, to see what kind of crash it was and whether it points to anything actionable.

I have cleared IE's cache with that method and now I can play while being logged in again. So that was the issue after all. I did notice that the game is overall a LOT faster when not logged in, but I don't think that will be solved for such an old game, so that is just a trade-of at this point. Thank you very much for all your help!