The 1.04 patch should not have caused a problem with existing saves.
In Neorealist's case it wasn't a problem hitting the item limit, and it doesn't sound like that is the problem for you, either. If you visited traders a lot in between the working and crashing save points, that could have generated a bunch of new items, though.
There is no description of the problem, so I don't know if being started pre or post patch would make a difference. It likely wouldn't be a factor, though; generally it is just story related fixes and changes that can not be safely applied to existing saves.
