After going through all of the permissions and temp directories and what not, here is what I did to solve the issue. Any installation that I did into the default directory (meaning C:\Program Files (x32)) CR would crash when I tried to open the Database Expert. After checking everything that was suggested to me, I ended up installing CR onto my D: drive into a CrystalReports directory. This worked wonderfully and I haven't had any issues since. This leads me to believe that there is some permission issue on something. I was never able to pinpoint where or what. It did work and then one day it stopped. From that point forward, I could not get it to work properly in C:\Program Files (x32) at all.
Hope this helps,