I had pretty much the same issue as you. Recently installed the game on a fresh external SSD for EW and I was playing fine for a little bit until the game crashed 2 days ago. After that, every time I tried to log in I crashed immediately, sometimes without errors. Tried everything I could think of or find online and nothing was working.

What ended up letting me play again (for now, fingers crossed) was reinstalling the game onto my internal HDD and then moving the folder to my external SSD. I can only assume the problem is related to external SSDs somehow, as I was also able to log in normally while the game was on my internal HDD.

Hope this info can be of some use to you, good luck.