2. Electrum wasn't available before 2011, nobody but spesmilo knows that for sure; his first commit on github is bumping up the version number. from distutils.core import setup version = "0.29" version = "0.30" So question, might be when did github to allow developers to push their code first come out. He might have been using SVN before that.
I have now managed to check all my seeds against version 0.3 and most of the words are rejected. So now back to square one. Maybe it was a different version of Electrum, maybe it was some other random wallet type whose name I can't remember. What a nightmare.