Notes on your patched 2.9A:
I haven't had any crashes. The only major problem that I encountered that affects gameplay is the city screen / Nixon list overlap screen. On my machine, after a few turns, the city screen becomes inoperably slowed, the buttons cease to work, and the only way to continue is to exit out by hitting return: thus, no city management.
A caveat: I'm playing on a laptop without t/l support. The first few firaxis patches were aimed at simpletons like me who bought the game without bothering to realize that specific requirement on the minimum specs, and spent the next few weeks shaking our fist mightily at the screen in the unbridled shame and self-loathing of computer graphics impotency. Those patches soon took care of the problem, however.
What's odd is that all of the unique leaderheads (I checked the civilopedia)/ some of the units added by your file and patch revert back to the graphics glitches in the 1.00 release, while the rest of the game looks/acts normal.
Screenshots:
Cetshwayo and Ayenwatha, through the looking glass.
The slave (not worker as falsely captioned in the second shot) is no longer a pink dot, but a brown-shadowed ghost who occasionally wields a disembodied pickaxe.
Medieval infantry is a hammer, shield and helmet, albeit an extremely motivated and pissed-off hammer, shield and helmet.
I have no idea why this happens. I previously downloaded Civgold for 1.51, and the leader animations and units there appeared fine. Is it just a matter of a level of ornateness in your designs that are not matched by the originals? The firaxis 1.62 patch? I don't really think this is a problem for you to fix, as others have not reported it I assume it is a function of my graphics card and memory, but I am curious why it occurs.
Other minor, petty quibbles:
As with the "119 added" message, "TC:250" or somethiing like it popped up two or three times as a subtext, related possibly to a forest growing spontaneously or a technology being stolen somewhere.
As has been noted previously, the technology screen indicates audibly but not visually user input, but works fine.
Aforementioned forest/jungle chopping.
The aboriginal up-armored worker (great idea, btw) is, unlike other workers, not captured in combat but destroyed. Similarly an enemy slave unit (productivity half a worker) is not destroyed when captured (even when slavery is not the conqueror's civic) but instead becomes a full-fledged emancipated worker (perhaps the user promises a McCain-Kennedyesque path to citizeship?). I'm not sure if this is a bug or feature.
Your quick-response patch seemed to take care of the other initial glitches. And, I must emphasize, none of these problems save the city screen actually affect gameplay in any way, but are merely the caffeine-addled henpeckings of this particular Sevomod enthusiast (the problem, I guess, with being so responsive to community input is ever-increasing amounts of community input.)
Your patch overall is a great improvement to the original game. If you don't release any more updates it is still magnitudes better than the original game itself. I'm at the garage complaining to the mechanic about too-small cup-holders, or a perceived dent in the fender of a bequeathed Mercedes, without in any way knowiing how to begin to repair it myself, or even understanding how an engine works. (And the mechanic traditionally demands compensation for suffering such fools.) So, thanks for the Benz; I do doff my cap, sir.
Also: the valkyrie-winged horseman is a great touch. Anything that conjures up Wagnerian notions of napalmed victory in a series of 0s and 1s is a plus in my book.