Hi Joseph,
Before you start building the report, make sure the right transports have been loaded on the SAP System. The right Transport files are the ones found inside the installation zip you download from SAP's server. They're under the "Collaterals\Add-Ons\SAP\Transports" folder.
For more info on Transports, authorizations etc, please have your BASIS admin go through this wiki:
To resolve your first issue, please follow the steps from this thread:
Problems with SAPLogon.ini for SAP GUI and Crystal 2011
P.S: Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.1 does a better job at handling BEx queries that the CR 2013 designer. It directly connects to BEx queries via the BICS connectivity driver and doesn't need the Transports to be there on the SAP System. You might want to give this flavour of CR a try too.
-Abhilash