Lol, drop the "Sir". If your name is any indication, I'm younger than you.
There is a way to fix both your problems. Though it comes at a price, a trade-off if you will.
Tick the options shown in the screenshot.
Now here's the thing, doing this will cause certain animations during combat to become all jumbled up and leave garbage on the screen.
Again, you can either
1) Enable these options to fix the character portraits during intermission scenes as well as to remove the black borders around character sprites on the overmap.
or
2) Disable these options to enable proper combat animations.
But never both at the same time. At least that's how it is for me. (I'm using the latest build by the way. Build 2319.)
There is a way to fix both your problems. Though it comes at a price, a trade-off if you will.
Tick the options shown in the screenshot.
Now here's the thing, doing this will cause certain animations during combat to become all jumbled up and leave garbage on the screen.
Again, you can either
1) Enable these options to fix the character portraits during intermission scenes as well as to remove the black borders around character sprites on the overmap.
or
2) Disable these options to enable proper combat animations.
But never both at the same time. At least that's how it is for me. (I'm using the latest build by the way. Build 2319.)