If you spend as much time in Crystal Reports as I do you, you might appreciate being able to customize it a little bit.  I found a pair of old blog posts on the SAP website that show you how to change the splash screen image, and also how to add a background image to the Crystal Reports start page [ both links are no longer active (7/2013)].

The splash screen is simple to change.  Just take any bmp and rename it to splash.bmp.  Then put it into the same folder that has the file CRW32.exe.  The default folder, unless you change it is:

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86

Changing the start page is a bit more work.  There is a file called start.html in this folder (usually):

C:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0\win32_x86\Start Page\en

If you know how to edit HTML and Javascript you can do whatever you want. If you are like me you can download the sample file provided in the blog post, and follow the instructions for naming your image file and locating it into the correct folder.

One tip I can add from from having done this:  if you use an image that is busy at the top, it might be difficult to read the ‘recently used file list’.  I used Paint to edit my image so that it has a 2-inch white border at the top.  That gave the recently used file list, and the list of wizards, a place to print above my picture.