Actually, doing all of those things and then switching to Xero, Freshbooks or some other program is probably the only sure-fire fix for anything involving Intuit. 

I did manage to fix the issue. It dawned on me that a few months ago I modified my Windows host file to prevent QB from communicating with certain servers that Intuit uses to try to sell us other services, which was causing a lot of users, including me, to repeatedly crash on start-up. Once I unblocked the correct server, I was able to re-connect with Chase.