OK I figured out how to totally disable pulseaudio and indeed it
starts up fine using just ALSA. Bit stuttery though (got 125fps in
the video test).
Wonder why it crashes using pulseaudio?
There are multiple caveats as to why pulseaudio causes so many problems. There's a blame game, there's hardware, there's software... so, I'm going to do my best to explain it to my level of understanding.
For more advanced hardware (specifically sound cards), pulseaudio and ALSA (OSS... etc, etc) (therefore CrossOver/Wine) play well together (not always perfectly...). This is because more advanced sound cards have a built-in mixer that supports multiple streams. Less advanced sound cards only support one sound stream and when pulseaudio is enabled it takes over that sound stream, therefore not allowing any other sound to stream (which causes all kinds of problems, namely that games played through CrossOver don't get sound but sometimes the games crash completely).
There is a push for Wine/CrossOver to support pulseaudio which would get around the single streaming sound cards because pulseaudio has it's own mixer that supports multiple input streams... but this has not yet happened. If you want to learn more about this, you can read up on pulseaudio in the Wine community forums or on various other forums. I must warn that it is a heated topic in some forums and stirring up the bees nest is not advisable.