Modding minor civs, techtree probs, map sizes

I own the Ultimate Ed of GC2 for quite a long time but hadn't time to play much until recently.

1. I want to mod certain minors, but can't find where the info is stored. Normally it's the raceconfig file, which I found easily. However, sometimes there are certain minors popping up in mid-game for which I can't find entries in the raceconfig. For example Carinoids, Snathi etc are there, but where can I change the pics, settings etc of Vegans, Jagged Knife or some other minor that is not in the "normal" raceconfig?

2. I own the German version and it seems some tech trees are bugged or don't match those of the English version? I played the Drengin once, and they had "space weapons" very difficult to research (which may explain their bad performance as AI). I wanted to correct this by modding but somehow I messed up their tree completely.

I had backups fortunately, but couldn't get my modification to work. Finally I just gave them the Korath tree which works somehow, though it's not what I wanted first. Is this a known prob and are there other techtrees with probs too I should be aware of? 

3. My game always produces a CTD when I get the Dreadlords event, so I switched mega events off. Is there a workaround by modding for that, or a patch in sight to solve this?

4. Is there a way to mod map sizes or can you just use the pre-definded sizes? For example, "large" has 12x12 and then "gigantic" as the next step has 18x18. Can you tell the game to create sizes in between, say, 14x14x or 16x16?