Hm.
Well, your best bang for the buck move would be to get a better video card. The GTS 250 is pretty solid, but if you're running into issues with multiple enemies on-screen, it's the video card. You might think about a beefier processor. Not sure what mobo you're working with, but look at stuff like bus speed and consider getting a faster model. You'd be surprised how much of an impact the motherboard has on performance. More ram never hurts, but 4 gb should be plenty depending on the speed. After that, look at your power supply and make sure everything's getting enough juice. Finally, you might think about your hard drive, maybe getting a faster one or setting up RAID.
No idea about patches in the works, or the mouse accel thing. But yeah, for upgrades, it sort of depends on how much money you're willing to spend. If you only get one thing, I would say get the biggest, nastiest video card you can, and after that look at motherboard/CPU upgrades, then the rest.