That's very odd then. In the circumstances this error occurs, I've been playing over Hamachi with a friend of mine. We usually spend about one to two hours per game session, then save at the end. The chat log is displayed constantly and I can generally see messages going back to about 30 minutes ago. I was not even aware that you had to hover over the message icon! This definitely doesn't seem right now 
Specifically, messages are supposed to be displayed for 10 seconds and then disappear after that. The older messages can only be seen by hovering over the message icon. Unless there is a huge amount of chat going on, this makes the chat messages very unobtrusive but the older ones still available. At least, this is the design intent. More on this in a second.
EDIT: I've just been playing about in-game and it seems the chat log problem only affects me in multiplayer - if I start a new single player game and just spam the chat, the messages give the desired result of disappearing after 10 seconds. Just got a friend to test multiplayer with me and when we both spam the chat, sure enough, the messages stay on screen and obstruct my view.
This addendum was actually very interesting -- from what you are saying, it sounds almost like there is a difference in timestamps or something between your machines. However, I just dug through the code and this is set on the local machine only. So I am having a hard time seeing why this would be different in multiplayer versus solo, it uses the exact same code and I would expect it to function the same.
In the end, I think both most of your problems are most likely related to the fact that you are playing this on VMWare on a Mac. The game wasn't designed to run there, and I don't have any way of testing on that platform myself, which means it is technically not a supported platform from us. So the bad news is that you might run into some inexplicable problems that no one else has ever had for this reason, and for that I apologize and beg your patience.
The Big However: On the flip side, you have no idea how excited I am that you are getting it to run in this environment, and I'd love to get it working squeaky-clean for you. It sounds like mostly that is already happening, but I don't know what other smaller problems there might be that you have just not run across or really noticed yet (that maybe seem like they are intentional, if somewhat nonideal, but which are really bugs). Who can say.
With this chat window thing, for instance, it seems like it is something related to it not being set to expire for some reason, and that makes me wonder if there is a problem with the accuracy of checking the Time in your environment. It's always possible there is some other sort of bug, but I can't duplicate it and I don't see anything in the code that throws up a red flag for me. So in this circumstance, the only thing I can do is give you a way to test this further, as well as a way to potentially clear items from the list so that you can at least work around this for the time being. I'll put out a new prerelease this morning with those in there for you. Hopefully that will both help you work around it, as well as help you help me figure out what exactly is different in your environment.
As a side note: you may want to consider using external voice chat of some sort (Skype, Teamspeak, whatever you prefer). That's certainly not required, but in my view it's a significantly more fun way to play if it's possible. But to each his/her own!
I have been debating if this should be created in the "Technical Issues" forum or the "AI Wars" forum - so I apologise in advance if I've chosen the wrong place for this topic.
No worries, this one is probably mostly a tech support thing, but this is fine too.
1) When creating a game for my friends to join, I cannot select which planet I start off with. My friends can, however. When I click the galaxy map, the icons just stay the same colour and give no feedback at all (I can't even tell if clicking them makes a difference at all, to be honest with you).
This is also possibly a factor of something about VMWare. It's most likely something to do with the cursor coordinates being off, or the translation from "Screen" to "local" coordinates being a bit different or something.
Hard to say just yet, but I do have something you could check in the current version: when you are mousing around the map in the lobby, when you mouse over a starting planet it is supposed to show a brown tooltip with explanations of the unit type at that location. Does that happen? If the tooltips are not showing, this confirms that it is some sort of mouse problem, at least. If the tooltips aren't visible, can you try exploring around the map with your cursor and let me know if there is some other hotspot that shows the tooltips, and if so about how much offset those hotspots are from where they should be?
On the other hand, if the tooltips are working fine -- and/or if you are able select a starting position when playing solo, which was not clear -- then this is some other sort of issue that I will need to look into in a different way, and potentially give you some debugging tools for that, too.
It's a brilliant game, brilliant community but it's just these two tiny issues that are nagging at me.
Thanks for that! Glad you like the game, but it's understandable that these two things would be very annoying. I'll post here when the prerelease is out in a few hours, and in the meantime if you have any more information about that second issue, it's much appreciated.
