I had a strange bug for some time that I thought at first was a feature. A lot of officers from a conquered npr wandered over and joined my staff upon conquering their capital. Looks like this:
...Notice that they don't have a rank, which is probably the reason these guys started to make problems. For example, whenever I now want to create a geology team, I get the following error windows (first every time the list is created or refreshed {also appears in other situations often enough}, second upon creation of the actual team):
It only happens on the geology groups here though, which is why I finally made the connection, because survey skills is the only relevant skill some of these officers have.
Btw., I can not directly select any of the Governors or Scientists who came over. This whole thing started back when I took the npr home planet from another npr that had just conquered it shortly before. Suddenly there were 13 Admirals in my staff on top of the single one I had. If thought that was a funny thing and made it a story point in the Astral Republic thread.(ambassadors coming over to negotiate the future and repopulation after freeing them) So the Admirals and the Ground Commanders were the only ones I could select directly in the officer list, where I eventually deleted them. (..or send them back somehow, don't remember)
With the Scientists and Governors I didn't even now for long that they also were there, because in my first screening I couldn't find any suspicious names in the lists, as they do not get listed on the left due to their missing rank. However, the right list doesn't care about rank, so this is where I eventually saw them and could also confirm some of their skills, like survey.(still cannot directly select them to see their profile) I think it is pretty safe to say that the missing rank is what is causing these issues here.
Why they are there to begin with? No idea.
I conquered two other nprs in that game, and some nprs previous to 6.42, but this never happened so far. The only thing that was different this time is as said that I took their home planet back from another 3rd party npr, which is some unique situation up to now.
Eventually the problem will solve itself, as I sometimes see these messages in the log: