Generally the error you are describing is caused by improper characters in the custom candidate's names. If you created them with the 1.02 patch, it should have replaced the nonalphanumeric characters with an underscore character in the places where it causes the error to happen. Otherwise, you would have to do it yourself.
The filename and the header of the custom candidate file should match, and neither should contain nonalphanumeric characters, including spaces, but they should work with underscores.
So if you have a custom candidate Jean-Luc Picard, the file name should be Jean_LucPicard.candidate and the header inside the file should say CANDIDATE Jean_LucPicard.
--Cari