What you fail to realize is that the HD texture pack was added as a free DLC and is part of the game now. Enabled it will chew up VRAM so yes just doing nothing and playing with it on after the patch will cause issues. In the launcher disable it in the Data Files section and that should solve the problem....if you were fine before you should be fine now. I would urge that you make sure your settings are not reverted because after a patch the autodetect kicks in and if your .ini is default which is read/write then it will change it.

If you want to be ignorant and just boot your game and have it work issue-less I suggest buying a console. The HD texture pack was released for those who spent a good chunk of money on a new rig to play this game. I think it should have been disabled by default but giving us free DLC to the people that can use it is far from screwed up.