Have you tried to update the catalyst driver directly from ATI?
I had a similar problem when running the game crossfired with an old catalyst provided by HIS and the game never made it past the intro movies, it always crashed to desktop (CTD) or froze requiring to reboot the machine, once I installed the latest update the game worked. Now I am using an Nvidia card (8800 GT SC from EVGA) which runs the game as silk, no hassle at 16 AF 16q AA with no less than 60 FPS attacking convoys!
