Okay so I found a fix a while back and forgot to report. Ensure that your antivirus, firewall and connection (private, public) settings are not blocking the application from connecting to the internet.
I think I might have found the issue, reset your windows firewall settings to default or turn it off while using character creator. It appears that there might be some conflict there.
Update: it seems that the application lags less without Smart Gallery installed. However it still crashes way too frequently.
I found that uninstalling Smart Gallery for CC3 helps very much. Although it doesn’t fix the issue it has helped reduces the amount of crashes by at least 70%.