THERE’S THE GOLD!!
In another thread, a simmer posted about working with Microsoft on a CTD problem, and after troubleshooting a while, they discovered that his crashes correlated with a portable heater turning on. It was on the same circuit as his flight computer, and after he unplugged it, he no longer got CTDs.
If you read many threads on CTDs, you see a lot of complaints about the sim running consistently for some period of time, then crashing. You see a lot of people claiming they don’t use overclocking, but when you get their motherboard specs, you see everyone buying these MBs that are designed specifically to support overclocking. And a lot of those boards with default settings automatically overclock memory and the CPU.
Why did this last update start causing all these CTDs? My theory is it added extra graphics features (VR, snow, glass cockpit optimizations, etc.), AND it came out as winter weather hit everyone. The combination of higher graphics, CPU, and memory load, plus the noisy power from portable heaters or central heat systems coming on creates the occasional equivalent of a system overclocked to the point of instability.
And I also believe in alien abductions and UFOs.