The issue I was having seems to be the result of a bad/partial install of the two aforementioned Windows updates, even though Windows reported that they were both installed.
This morning I decided to reinstall the two Windows updates to give them another test, but they both failed to install. I then deleted the SoftwareDistribution folder and restarted the PC and allowed Windows to install the updates again.
I’ve been playing the sim for more than five hours now and it hasn’t crashed once. So it looks like the updates themselves weren’t the cause of the crashes, rather a bad/partial install of them.