[nerbert]

Well, I think init_startup is as good a place to run your SELECT query as any (provided it's not too early, before the connection to the database is created), but showthread_start would work too. Theoretically you can edit the contents of datastore but it's stored as a compressed blob that's hard to read.

As for your flag images have you considered a country flag sprite? I'm working on converting a project to use sprites instead of images. There are several such sprites open source to download.