Hi, Ben,
I don't have an answer to the specific question - I've used Crystal for years, though I've never tried to hook into anything like that. I display messages saying 'Generating report preview....", but normally those only appear for a matter of seconds, not minutes.
However, while I don't know anything about the nature of the data you're working with, 11 minutes for 6,000 records is not likely to be acceptable for some users. Is this simply a report where you're passing/pushing in a result set of 6,000 rows and it's just a long report...or are you performing some actual processing of the data within Crystal?
Kevin