Thankyou for the feedback guys.
I am using the FLMM 1.3.1.
I have Crossife 1.9 and i'm installing it on a fresh install of freelancer.
I think the problem is my base version of freelancer - i don't have this 'launcher' that you guys are talking about. I click on the Freelancer icon and it goes straight to the game (v1.0)
If i play with this version, WITHOUT Crossfire, it does the same thing, crashes.
I tried to manually download the 1.1 patch but when i try to launch it i get a message saying "The retail version of freelancer is not installed on this system".
So i bypassed 1.1 ; i went straight to the unofficial 1.4 patch. It works! I can go around in space after extracting the files.
So i then tried to install Crossfire, and it stopped working again! ARGH!