Fixes for several issues with small changes

[rruusu]

This pull request solves multiple issues that I have worked on during the past year.

They are cherry picked from the branch "work", which includes changes originally made to the master branch in October 2024. I hadn't had the time earlier to rebase my code on the major refactoring done to SystemSC.cpp on 19.11.2024 (6d7a397).

Note: This request is based on the maintenance/v2.1 branch, on which I have been working on.

Related Issues

• #1323
• #1513
• #1336
• #1330
• #1326
• #1517
• #1518

Other changes

Includes some minor changes to logging messages.