Ok after some testing and trying of suggestions given to me on this board:
My saves were all completly hosed from the patch. Moving the saves, uninstalling, reinstalling, repatching.. trying the different patch versions along the way.. all failed.
Best as I can figure, something went wrong while patching. The save game versions should have been updated to 1.41, but infact remained 1.0 the entire time. I even tried reinstalling and repatching again after moving my saves back to their right place.
I now see that other people are having the problems I have, so I can feel confident that it wasn't something I did wrong.
As far as starting over.. no thanks. I'm not one for replaying games as it is, and I have very little confidence that Larian can resolve this quickly at this point. I don't want to start a new game and hit some bug that hoses me again. I certainly am not going to jump on the next patch thinking it's going to work properly.
I appreciate Larian's efforts in making this game, and trying to fix it. I guess with limited budgets we can't expect proper testing and QA, so I'm just going to delete it and move on. Warlord's Battle Cry 3 should be here for the weekend, so I'll be ok <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
Oh.. and just FYI, no I won't return the game. Sure, I should, but I'm going to go on faith that Larian will one day have this fixed and I'll be able to play it through. Also, I want them to make DD2, so they can keep my money and hopefully get enough funds to finish the game and QA it better than this one.
