@harasnicole Thanks for the dxdiag. Please uninstall the EA App with Revo Uninstaller (the free version is fine), and download a fresh copy of the installer to use.
Please also make sure Microsoft Teams is closed before you try to play. Teams is throwing a bunch of errors, and while those wouldn't normally directly affect Sims 4, they could have an effect on the system overall that also impacts the game. If Teams is set to start with Windows, and you can check in the Task Manager's Startup tab, please disable that for now.
If these steps don't help, please try playing in a clean user folder. Move the entire Sims 4 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and when you launch the game, a clean folder will spawn with no content. (Your saves and other content will be intact in the folder you moved but temporarily not read by the game.) Don't add anything to the new folder yet; just let me know whether you can get far enough to start a new save and play in live mode for a bit.
Okay. So, I used Revo Uninstaller to uninstall the EA App and then got a fresh installer. Microsoft Teams is already disabled on my laptop, so I didn't have to worry about that. Once I had the EA App reinstalled, I tried launching the game and got stuck in the perpetual loading screen, so once I force closed the game, I tried doing the other thing of taking the The Sims 4 folder out entirely to start a clean version. Same thing happened. The game launches just fine, but it just won't load to the main menu.
@harasnicole As a(nother) test, please create a new admin Windows account and try playing there. Make it local, as in, don't link it to your Microsoft account. You'll be able to sign into your existing EA account and launch Sims 4 without reinstalling anything.
If you still can't get past the loading screen, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor. Hit 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.
Look for any error that happened at the same time as you tried to load Sims 4, specifically in the new Windows account. If you find one, right-click its name and select "View technical details," then copy the information you see and post it here. If you don't find a corresponding error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.
Okay. I made the local account successfully, signed into my EA account and was able to launch The Sims 4, and the main menu loaded super quickly. I checked to see if I could access the Gallery, and I was, but I was missing the News tab (I only had the actual Gallery, my profile, and my downloads).
So, I guess, my next question is: Should I still do the Reliability Monitor thing on the new Windows account, or should do it on the main one? Or both?
Edit: I decided to do the Reliability Monitor on the main account first, and found a bunch of errors related to The Sims 4. They all say the same thing: "The program TS4_x64.exe version 1.101.290.1030 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel." I tried doing what it says, but I have no idea what I'm looking for.
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