Okay, did you try disabling your anti virus/firewall, and also are you allowing crossfire as a trusted program when you are running it? What Anti Virus do you got - better to answer this.
Are you running as administrator? Game won't work and it'll act up like that if its not ran on administrator.
Try using compatibility mode, in order to do so, you must right click on crossfire, go to properties, then go to the compatibility tab. Then check mark the box that says "Run this program in compatibility mode for" - or it'll say something similar to that, and then from the drop down menu, select the highest option given. I think your OS is Windows 7, but just to clarify, the highest option for Windows XP given is Windows 2000, while for Vista and 7, its Windows XP.