Yep, the crash is fixed in 1.05 and I managed to fix the "can't select production or research" bug by _ out the Cities subfolder. I'm going to try to narrow it down further.
EDIT: When I _ out GEC_Production.xml I'm able to choose production and research. I have no DLC so I suspect that's probably why this hasn't been seen before, but I don't know how to debug xml bugs.