alamo, its was a Firaxis or Take Two interview or something (not nVidia, that was a typo on my part). Someone in the forums posted saying there was a fix thats been released, people corrected him letting him know that interview was old, and Firaxis was talking about the ATI graphics problems. They provided a link, and in that link someone at Firaxis was asked about it, and Firaxis responded by saying they will be releasing a fix for the ATI problem very soon, and they will have a look at "other nvidia ---driver--- problems". That fix was the unpack thing posted on the civ support site.
The testers used older drivers comment is just an obviously logical one, since the latest nvidia driver (81.85) was released after the game went gold. The driver prior to that was released on September 2nd, which is also not far back enough to say it was used during beta testing (after beta testing you go into the another coding phase, then CD/DVD mastering phase, then Manual printing, then distribution..etc all that does not happen in 1 month). In addition, if we were to take the driver prior to that which was released August 12, then we probably got very close to the beta tester driver. Although it was definatly not the driver used while coding the game, since coding began atleast over a year ago if not more, so therefore the coders were using a very old driver.
This is normal, since it is nVidia's responsibility to make sure their new drivers are backward compatible so that they do not break older games, thus coders do not have to worry about that, same as saying coders were coding on older graphics cards, not the latest card that was released yesterday.
Since the two threads that mention downgrading your drivers (one for ATI, and the one i posted for nVidia) had the most success stories, it lends more credibility to what Firaxis has said regarding nvidia driver problems. Thus I believe we have found our culprit. Ofcourse we are all still waiting for an official patch
PS: for the life of me I could not find a "search" feature for these forums, except for that useless google search box at the top right.