I have the same issue on my saitek pro flight yoke and throttle quadrant. Started since sim update 7 thought it was my PC hardware failing or something, tried reinstalling game and using DDU to completely wipe graphics drivers and reinstalling latest nvidia drivers.
Turns out it was using the pov hat, using mouse to look around now, removed all pov hat functions in menu.
Weird thing is, using POV hat without live traffic or multiplayer or even AI traffic on would sometimes NOT cause game to crash…