@smiley might know more.
In the mean time you might want to look at the in game chat commands there might be a way to check for a given nick and not display their messages. So you'll still receive them but they won't bother you.
You can use the same way than for carthage buildings. But it's not an overlay you need extra textures.
Do you have a diff of what you changed in model common?
Keep up the good work
All the heads and body meshes. And possibly every single animation you want to use. Pretty sure they will not handle the scaling well.
You probably have missed an error in Blender.
Meshes that were exported with 3Dsmax needs a special edit to be importable in Blender.
See the following thread (which should probably be moved to the wiki)
There is also my plugin to import actors. Should probably be extended to support animations and to put variants in layers.
https://github.com/StanleySweet/blender_pyrogenesis_importer