[God Emperor]

Elowan,
Have been away several weeks and only just saw your post.
There is a way of making components race specific without screwing around with the racial traits.

The answer is to do as I did with my Borg variant. That is edit the TechArea.txt file to incorporate a new Tech Area (mine was called Borg Technology) which at different levels allows access to components of different levels. You then add this technology as a research area to the AI_Research.txt file.
As the race is the only one with the tech area in its research program, no other AI race can/will research it.
The only downside is that human players can research it (house rules apply!) and that it occaisionally will pop up on one of those tech planets/ruins as the bonus tech. If an AI player discovers it, there is no problem though as their AI_DesignCreation.txt files will not allow them to incorporate the components (provided that you have not just copied the Weapons/ Component numbers and have created new numbers instead).

As I said earlier, check out my Borg variant in the Race Archive to see an example of how it can be done.
Regards,
GE