I have a similar problem. I reinstalled the game yesterday after a reformat of the hard-disk (to all people who write viruses purely to annoy people, go kill yourselves why don't you), did an immediate upgrade to 1.61, and when I played the game all the text and pictures in the city box are replaced by blue boxes. I assumed that it was a problem with the patch as I had never encountered this problem before, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled the game without patching, and the problem was still there.