Singerstar9 Does the EA App issue happen if you have Sims 3 installed on your internal drive? I realize it's a large download, but you could test with only the base game, which is about 7 GB, rather than all your content. And you could rename the Sims 3 Packs folder on your external before uninstalling so it doesn't get deleted. Then when you went to reinstall, you wouldn't need to download all this data.
For the verification code, sometimes there's a delay, and sometimes the email gets sent to a spam folder. So please check again now, both your inbox and the spam filter.