The general guidelines to prevent bugs are don't have text stored or be saving before picking up an item or loading a new area.
I know for a fact that glitched spanner pick up can be forced by spamming save in the Mandarin corridor between East and West South Vale then entering the gate and storing text before it loads right until attempting to pick it up. I'm not entirely sure why though as you can pick up other items in the area just fine only for the spanner to glitch afterwards. The West South Vale softlock could be an artifact of the glitched spanner or spamming save in East before heading West or something else I didn't notice.
As far as loads being banned I seem to recall the reason being it was to prevent IGT abuse, though given what happened with SH3 I'm not sure there is much point anymore.
Going forward we will be requiring a visible IGT timer on submissions on the PC version, preferably using the LiveSplit script. Most people already do this, but we're making it mandatory to make run verification easier. Thank you for your understanding.
Runs submitted prior to this change will no
