I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to have had this problem (saw at least one post on usenet). So anyhow, if you are having problems with Freelancer crashing during the intro movies (second one in particular), go into your freelancer/exe directory and edit freelancer.ini. In the file you'll see [Startup and below that three movie_file = .... if you either delete those lines, or comment them out (; in front of them) it will skip the movies and you should no longer have it crash on startup.

I hope this helps those who have had this problem.