What causes the no weapons glitch is unknown and it can occur on any race without warning. It is known that something in the war3 mod in general causes this. The same issue used to be very common in gg until the developer of gg fixed it. I believe that the next war3 update may finally fix this issue. Let us hope that it does. Otherwise I will try to contact the gg developer for help and see if he can point us toward helping get war3 fixed.
What I can do now is try to narrow down what can cause the server to crash if that glitch occurs in order to work around it. If you all can find particular things that can trigger a crash when you have that glitch and then report them in the appropriate thread I can can prevent the crash.
As far as spawning with no knife I could create a script that runs x time after a client spawns to see if they should have a knife and if they do not give them one.