First question

Where do I modify the AI research speed?  Seemingly with 1 or 2 cities they are cruising into the upper research tiers and during a trade they have hundreds of research trade units while I might have 50.

I don't mind that it cheats, just want to modify that one aspect of it down a bit.

This is what I have my expert set at in coredifficultylevels.xml but I don't see anything specifically regarding research and don't see anything specific in elementaldefs.xml

<AIDifficultyLevel InternalName="AIDiffLvl_Expert">
        <DisplayName>Expert</DisplayName>
        <AIEconomicRatio>1.25</AIEconomicRatio>
        <AIFOWCheat>0</AIFOWCheat>
        <AIHPRatio>1.25</AIHPRatio>
        <AIStartingFundsRatio>3.0</AIStartingFundsRatio>
        <AISovereignHPRatio>3.0</AISovereignHPRatio>
        <AIUsesCombatMagic>1</AIUsesCombatMagic>
        <AIIntelligenceFactor>10.0</AIIntelligenceFactor>
    </AIDifficultyLevel>

Second Question

Recently I've been having issues loading saved games.    I played for a couple hours earlier today, saving every turn or so.    Even reloaded a couple I think, can't quite remember. 

When I attempt to load any of my last saves it just hangs.   If I look in the debug.err the last 2 lines when I kill the process are below.     There are some random other errors as well, but nothing near the end.     Does this have any bearing or is there another log file I'm missing?

Debug Message:  Map Generation Complete
Debug Message:  LOAD GAME: Game Save Version: 13
Debug Message:  LOAD GAME: Game Version (at time of save): 1.50
Debug Message:  WARNING: New improvement of type LargeEmptyLot, owned by -1, has no art pack for style , and no default can be found!
Debug Message:  WARNING: New improvement of type LargeEmptyLot, owned by 0, has no art pack for style EmpireStyle, and no default can be found!