I usually have to repair the game after a update. My problems isn't as serious as yours, it's usually just a some little glitch that happens after a patch.
Like today I realized that sense the last patch my sims hadn't had any visitors come over to the house and knock on the door. I came out of the game and done a repair and started the game back up and had a visitor after playing about an hour.
The patch before that I wasn't able to fish and had to do a repair to fix that.
But it is strange that the patch will break something and repairing the game will fix it.