My team is also experiencing this same issue. No projects are involved in creating this crash. After pressing launch for 18.1 in the Epic Games Launcher in order to setup a new project, the engine will crash. I can also confirm that it always happens at 79%.
Opening the engine and our 18.1 VR project on computers that do not have SteamVR installed has no issues.
Crash only happens on computers that have SteamVR installed for use with HTC .