Carl, could you please tell me what Fullscreen Windowed mode is and also what Sim-in-background functionality is? I'm not familiar with either of them.
I think I confirmed that the large number of items in all of my sims' inventories was, at least, part of the problem causing crashing. It took me about 3 hours, because of the frequent crashing, but I deleted or sold most of my sims' items and the crashing has subsided.
I'm happy that I found a way to stop the crashing, but I'm still disappointed that the game allows you to have that many items, but then doing so leads to crashing. I worked in QA for SOCOM at Zipper Interactive (or other words, I was a "tester"), and I feel that this kind of thing should have been quickly discovered and remedied.
On a side note, I hope they come up with a better way of organizing items in your sim's inventory soon. I also hope they make fertilizing plants easier, so that you don't have to fertilize them one-by-one, and so that the game doesn't momentarily freeze if you have a lot of plants and fish in your inventory, while trying to fertilize. Of course, maybe that is already possible, and I just haven't figured it out yet.
For now, I have scaled way back on the gardening in general.
Returning to the topic of preventing crashes, I now avoid saving the game while my sim's inventory is open in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I make sure one of the other tabs is open.
I've also returned to the old habits for preventing crashes in Sims 3: saving frequently and using "Save as" instead of "Save" or "Save and Quit." I have no idea if that is having any effect whatsoever though.
I had also mentioned crashes related to a specific sim that I had created visiting another one of my played households. I haven't experienced that crash since deleting the items, as mentioned above. Perhaps. the crashing wasn't related to that character at all.
