Hmm, that's very strange; presumably there was some sort of event, or something. I've never seen anything like that, or heard mention of it. Hopefully with my changes in the next prerelease, any prior issue will be moot anyway, but this is a real head scratcher.
Nice job with the win there! Sounds great about the second game, glad the Fast and Dangerous sounds interesting to you. I also prefer it for how much faster it is to deal with force fields, etc. My current four-player game is just about an hour or two away from being done (knock on wood -- one AI home planet down, one to go), and it's taken 12 hours so far with difficulty 7s on Fast & Dangerous mode. It's been a really tough map/scenario, though.