[Edi]

There is sometimes strangeness with the province defenders, where the defenders are something other than the poptype would indicate. It might be that you ran into this phenomenon. Try it again.

Poptype is assigned randomly unless it has been specified in the map file, but if you have some kind of a typo with the #setland or other commands, it might cause problems. If you're using the #land command, it kills all units in the province, and in that case it might be possible that Dom2 assigns random indies (I don't know if this happens).

As for your start location problem, there is currently no answer. If the start location provinces do no have anything special in them, I don't see why it should be a problem, unless they are situated in or near bottlenecks that are supposed to stay bottled for a while.

Edi