Long story short, I was looking forward to playing some Sims 3 for the second time this week, and lo and behold, the accursed EA app decided that now was the perfect time to do an update.

Everything worked fine, I did the "set affinity" trick in the control panel, and... crash. With an error message, thankfully. Specifically, error code 0x0175d824.

Decided to go the the magic Google. Google gives me all sorts of different solutions, and none of them are relevant. I did a game repair just in case, and that didn't work. The ONLY thing that changed is EA's stupid facking glarching (Simlish for whatever you want it to mean) launcher. The game literally worked on Monday. I haven't installed anything, changed anything, heck I haven't even added or removed any custom music.

I'm exhausted. I'm tired. I'm not a fan of 4 and want to play 3. Heck, I can't believe I'm saying this, but i want Origin back. It had it's issues, but at least the game freaking LAUNCHED and didn't require me to either re-purchase everything or dig out a CD key from a literal storage crate in my dead grandmother's attic. I'm tired, I'm pissed, and I'm wondering if ANYONE has had this issue or came up with a fix. We the people need to do something about this, honestly.

System Specs:
ROG Strix Gaming Laptop
Windows 11
12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H 2.50 GHz
16GB RAM
NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070ti laptop GPU (main graphics card)
Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics (onboard card)

Please keep in mind that it's been a while since I've done this so I don't actually recall which tutorial I followed, but you can bypass EA App and use Origin instead. I did so a while back so I could play Alice and the Mass Effect games without installing the EA App.
I'd say maybe try this one or this one? Otherwise, just search "how to use origin instead of ea 2024" and there should be plenty of tutorials and youtube videos explaining it.