Unable to use new races

I am unable to load ships from the Tribe,Order,Swarm. They don’t appear in the build ship or fleet HQ screens, but they appear in change race screen during battle.

I tried a complete uninstall and then installing the collector’s edition, but this did not resolve the problem. Even completely deleting the directory did not resolve the issue and ships I had created are still loadable, even though they are no longer in the data directory!

Clearly some piece of GSB is surviving somewhere and messing things up. But where?

I’m not sure exactly what you mean. Are the ships hulls for these races still selectable? They do not, by default come with new ships, you have to design them, so you should be seeing hulls, but not ships (until you save some). All your designs are stored outside the gsb folder inside
\my documents\my games\gratuitous space battles\ships

I see what you mean. The hulls are selectable but ships which came with the mods are not there. So I need to do is copy the ships from the mod folders to \my documents\my games\gratuitous space battles\ships and all the ships will be there to select.