Exactly the same here 
Surface Pro, Windows 8.1. Can’t tell whether it crashes when importing JPGs or PNGs as it crashes immediately on startup without showing any Progress
EDIT:
I quickly looked up Unity’s command line arguments. No idea why but
“Unity.exe -force-opengl” did it for me so far 
EDIT2:
Looks like -force-d3d11 works better - OpenGL mode is very unstable when entering playmode