Good that you found this. I didn't have the patience to go through 10 years of stuff that accumulated. I generally don't edit my init.m file, but some of the packages probably did. (When I saw my problems, I had not loaded anything, but there appears to be a mechanism that loads some stuff automatically and silently.)
The question is why this caused a problem now, as well as the similar problems I saw during the beta. I did file a bug report during the beta test.
george
