Configuring CFREPORT is more dificult than it aught be. It would be a dream come true to just send cfreport your .rpt file and some database login credidentials; but there are a few undocumented things to work out.
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_18639
The crpe32.dll from the crystal reports intsall must be copied into the correct place {Windows}/system32/. This is at least documented on macromedia’s site, and the simplest of hurdles to getting crystal reports working.
It seems when things arn’t configured properly for cfreport, in a j2ee cluster configuration it can break the connector (this is when you see >. errors… not fun; When you get a connector error you basically have to shutdown everything and restart it all. Front end webserver all the way through each application server. Restarting doesn’t actually get rid of the problem, only the symptom. Hopefully you have it happen only in your development environment. It looks like you need 6.1 Updater 1, not just plain 6.1 (This was in a standalone coldfusion install; It might be different for a J2EE install)
It would be nice if cfreport used the coldfusion datasources, but it doesn’t. There seems to be a major gap in the documentation concerning this. I have had to run a developer edition of crystal report on each server and create a database connection in the crystal report tool before cfreport will work on that server with that datasource. It apears the ‘datasource’ is specific to crystal reports, not coldfusion.
An unexpected error occurred while using the Crystal Engine. Unable to find error details file
D:/wwwroot//cfr/ERROR.TXT, error was: Error attempting to open file to be mapped.
Copy a report.htm and a report.ini file from dev into that folder from a working server and the report came up like a charm, but good luck generating new reports. This is also one of the problems that went away for me when I upgraded to 6.1 Updater 1.
… or you could just use ColdFusion 7.0