So after getting the creation kit to work for me I decided to do a little messing around see if I could recreate one of my races from Morrowind. It's definitely not particularly obvious how to go about this.
One issue is having a humanoid head, but still having a tail.

http://www.sabregirl.com/mods/skyrimxpt1.jpg
This one I could not delete the khajiit mouth part no matter what I did. Not that I'd mind the Khajiit mouth if it wasn't sticking out past the actual mouth. I'm assuming I could fix the khajiit textures showing up with a little more fiddling


http://www.sabregirl.com/mods/skyrimxpt2.jpg
This one did not appear to recognize the tail and turned it into a flattened ribbon on the back.

My guess at current is some type of modeling would be necessary to get the particular combination I'm looking for. Unless someone has any ideas.

-S

Did you use a beast race skeleton on your elf to recognize the tail as opposed to human skeleton?

I'd love to but I don't know how to point it to a beast skeleton without extracting the gamedata.

On the Body Data tab hit the Edit button by the Skeleton and enter:

Actors\Character\Character Assets\skeletonBeast.nif

You don't have to extract it. The CK knows where it's stored.

Heh that worked, for some reason I didn't think you could actually just copy the path into the box . . . silly me.

-S

Oh yes! I'm incredibly lazy so I rarely extract things.