I have been playing without any issues for 4 months now. I got around to upgrading my video card setup. I was originally running 2 - EVGA 9600GT in SLI then I went and bought an EVGA GTX560 1GB FTW and installed it. I removed old video drivers and reinstalled 295.72 and has been running fine. However last night I was questing where you find the special gauntlets for the orc chief and after I had given him the gauntltes they attacked me and killed me. Then the game crashed to desktop (CTD). then I tried to restart the game and Steam had to download a 930MB file before the game would start.
Very odd and all ideas welcome.

Hard to say why it crashed, but the crash itself probably corrupted a file and you then had to redownload it.

Have you verified your OC is stable recently? Might have degraded. Also you may want to make sure you HDD is in good condition with a scan disk.

All good idea's Wolf,

Yes I did verify the OC and it is stable using prime95 and Intelliburn on 64bit. I scanned the HDD and it had no errors. However I did remove the HD texture pack then verified game files then re-installed the texture pack and have been playing for about 2 hours with no issues.
Weird how a hardware change would change game files. This leads me to believe that Steam scans a computers hardware setup and only downloads acceptable files?
Any other thoughts on this??

Thanks Wolf for your insights.