Starting fresh from today and the problem remains. Last night I deleted the folders and this morning started up the pc and redownloaded the game, and installed as per the instructions in the OP. Started a new game. QSP crashed very early on. I have long ago disabled the Fast Startup feature in Windows 10 that prevents it from shutting down properly (I remember doing this a month after building the PC, two and a half years ago) when telling it to do that, so I don't think that's the issue. I've played a handful of other QSP games and I've noticed it's just a very unstable program in general. It's probably not for nothing that the OP warns to use the version that's packaged with the game and no other. Girl Life appears to generally be stable and run with no issues but other games have been quite crash happy and buggy from what I can remember.I understand how confusing this is but what you are saying is exactly what I expected. How windows 10 works is extremely counter-intuitive when it comes to memory. Shutting down your PC every day is effectively the same as letting it powered on. A shutdown is in terms of memory the same as putting the PC in sleep mode. In other words, even though you shut it down every single day, your PC has been running non-stop since your last RESTART as far as your PC's memory is concerned.
It's a complicated matter that I suggest you look up on youtube from actual experts to fully understand how it actually works and how it affects your PC's performance.
Do let me know if your issue was solved.
I also have 8GB of GPU ram, the hard drive is not going to sleep as it is constantly going through a huge playlist of MP3's and besides, I've set my drives to not go to sleep until there's been twenty minutes of inactivity, and while playing I'm not taking twenty minutes in between actions. I could transfer it to my SSD but I doubt I'll see a difference there. Buggy drivers, bad RAM, virus or other malware issues I don't think so. I have a lot of games installed on this and I have problems with absolutely none of them. I don't think it's an issue of video memory being full when the game is either crashing very early on or taking forever to do anything relatively quickly.The problem is specific to your PC. It could be anything from your anti-virus to your hard drive going to sleep, to a 3rd party video codec, to a buggy video driver, to bad memory, to a software conflict, to a virus/worm/spyware/malware, etc.
There is a small delay when starting a new day but other than that the game runs great. Some players have to shut the game down and restart it after a few hours of gameplay when the pictures and videos stop showing up in game. I've never had this issue personally. I believe it is related to video memory being full but since I have 8GB of video memory I never see it.
It could take 20 pages of forum posts before your issue is solved. This thread isn't for PC troubleshooting. There are other threads for that. I do hope you find the problem though!
I could run the game inside a VM and I would be willing to bet it'd be just as unstable in there. I guess I'll just have to do without this game.