Haven't tried using Homecrafter yet, but BodyShop doesn't work for me either after I got Nightlife. It crashes during the loading screen. Quite annoying.
Have you tried taking the 'savedSims' file out of the ea games folder, and then load Body-shop? Often body shop crashes are caused by a corrupt sim in the saved sims folder. If it works after taking out the folder, try putting your saved sims back a few at the time, see if body shop loads and keep adding until it crashes again. Then you'll know that the corrupt skin(s) was in the latest batch of skins that you put back into the game (via the saved sims folder).
It's a pain in the neck (at least for me, body shop takes ages to load and close up), but it usually solves my crashing problem. If this is redundant, sorry :D