With a bit more searching I resolved my launcher issue. What I did was:

Went to documents > my games > final fantasy xiv

Changed the file "FFXIV_BOOT.cfg" so that it says

"StartupCompleted 1" instead of "StartupCompleted 0"

Now that just leaves my crashing issue. It could just be the heat, so I'm having an extra fan blow on it. Seems to work so far.