Mass effect legendary crash ea app

I recently re-installed Mass Effect Legendary Edition to finish a play through I stopped back in October.  I have the game in Steam, but it has always required launching through Origin.  Back in October when I last played, it let me launch via Origin no problem.  When I re-installed ME:LE via Steam and launched it, it launched Origin but immediately opened a popup saying I had to update to a new "EA App."  I tried to get around this, because while I never liked Origin, it worked, and I was just trying to launch my game.  The pop-up blocked me from taking literally any action of any kind in Origin, including launching ME:LE.  Literally couldn't even run the game without installing this new app.  Huge red flag red there, but fine.  I installed the new app.

So I open ME:LE, get into the game select, everything is going fine so far.  I open Mass Effect 3 and make sure I'm loading my (un-modded) save from when I left off.  It starts loading, shows the "loading" screen (with the description of current mission), lasts about 3 seconds and then crashes straight back to the launcher.  Not great. So I try loading another save, also un-modded, no save editor or anything like that, same exact result.  I try starting a new game, select the gender, it starts loading, 3 seconds, crash back to launcher.  

So I've spent the better part of 3 hours now searching around different solutions.  Graphics drivers are updated, tried different offline mode combination (these didn't let me get to the point of launching the game - if Steam is offline, then it just doesn't launch at all, and if EA App is offline, it throws a "something went wrong" error when steam tries to launch ME:LE through EA App), turned off in-app overlay in both Steam and EA App, turned off V-Sync, all resulting in the same crash.  I verified the install in Steam, rebooted, even tried switching display settings before loading save to see if it was something that stupid.  Same results.

At this point I'm convinced the issue is something with the EA App, as that's the only appreciable differentiation from when I was previously able to play the game just fine.  Yet ME1 and ME2 both load saves just fine (also using Legendary edition).  I'm at my wit's end now.  It seems like EA has gone out of their way to ensure I can't use a working application, Origin, but has introduced a defect in their new application that completely prevents me from playing Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition.