I have found out what was causing the global pollution message that was popping up all the time.
I have put in each change you had suggested individually and then started a new game. All changes worked fine until I decided to put the Maxplayers and Number of players change in the userprofile.txt and proflie.txt. I seems I cannot change these past the default settings so I am unable to play the game with more than 8 civs and unfortunatley barbarian uprisings dont bring about any new civs

I am using version 1.0 not the new patch that was just released.
Do you know what the problem could be ?
And do you have any other changes you have made to the game to make it more challenging ?
thanks