Crusade refuses to load after choosing characters and a stage

If I run Crusade, when I choose my character and an opponent along with a stage, the game closes while it's loading. No crash, it just says "loading items" or something like that and then closes. Then various dialog boxes come up, saying that various things like my browser and Steam couldn't be found. Kapersky freaks out and says that the .exe has a trojan inside of it, then tries to fix it while various .DLLs go missing and Windows completely crashes, forcing me to hard reset.

If I run Crusade on my antivirus whitelist, when I choose my character and an opponent along with a stage, the game closes while it's loading. No crash, it just says "loading items" or something like that and then closes.

I've tried redownloading, running it as an admin, and running it in Compatibility Mode. None of which have worked.

I'm using a HP Elitebook 8540w running Windows 7 and am running Kapersky Internet Security 2015.

Regarding the first part with the dialog boxes, it sounds like you might have problems with some intrusive applications/viruses. I'd recommend making sure your system is clean of unwanted things first.

It's likely the game abruptly shuts down because it's unable to read the encrypted files. This is would be caused by necessary dlls not being in the right place. When you unpack the game, please ensure that your antivirus doesn't delete these files. Here are the names of all the dlls that should be in the game's folder and are included in the package:
- 39dll.dll
- allegro-5.0.6-monolith-mt.dll
- crypt.dll
- fmodex.dll
- GMFMODSimple.dll
- itempoint.dll
- PAK_File.dll