re:2
One solution (no solution at all really) is to take any old texture and palette, name them blower.*, put them in a pod, mount the pod and the game will use that texture instead of crashing due to it being missing (because the bad texture size error is caused more often by a MISSING texture than an a actual wrong sized one... oops.. phin already said that
. Its a quick fix when you know you have a bad pod but want to play it.
Tip for tracking down odd stuff like this:
Use the Windows FIND feature to look for text strings inside of files. Extract the problem pod, then search the folder for files containing "blower" and a you may find the specific bin that calls upon that texture (you can even open a bin with notepad to see the texture names it uses). At least you'll know what file is the culprit.
I've used the FIND "containing text" feature to look in a bunch of pods for a file I needed, then opened it with winpod and extracted what I needed. So.... search all pods for the text string "blower.raw" and you should find the pod that contains a reference to it.
It's also possible you have several pods with a blower.raw in them, and one may have a bad texture that is messing up the others, in this case the one mounted highest in the pod.ini would be the culprit.