Has anyone come across the problem with petitioning the EL Aurians for membership? When I petition them for membership the game acts normal for a turn then on the second turn an error comes up and the game shuts down. Is this a known bug or a bad download on my part?

are you sure this a BotE bug? Probably you mean a Supremacy bug since there are no El-Aurians in our game. Otherwise attaching a save game will clarify the issue (also whether you played Supremacy or BotE).

I moved topic to Supremacy bug reports for the time being.

Yes, it's a known bug with all races that don't have their own insignias. We are not planning to fix it since in the final version (actually before that) every race will have it's own insignia.

This bug basically happens because an image is missing from the game files. This isn't due to a corrupted download or anything like that; the image itself was never included in the release. Several insignia images are actually missing because the images were never made. We've since replaced most of the insignia images with new versions, but there are still races that don't have an insignia image. We've working on making images to cover these holes and prevent the bug resurfacing in the next update, whenever that may be.

The game is simply looking for an image that isn't there. So as long as you put in an image file with the right filename, the game will try and load it - and therefore won't crash when the race joins you. Here's the current image we have for the El Aurians; right-click save as the file. Save it to your Supremacy/Resources/Images/Insignias folder. You will then be able to member the El Aurians without encountering the crash.