Glad to hear you found a solution to your problem. I'd highly recommend contacting JoomlArt and letting them know that they are altering links that they shouldn't. We also didn't change anything with our loading of that files with this release, so I'm not sure why the problem would have started just after the upgrade.
Regardless though, hopefully it's all working smoothly now. Should you run into anything else or need more assistance, just let us know.
Thanks,
Alex