Ok, just fired it up and did some FRAPs comparisons before and after. Load times are significantly faster after the patch than before for me. I'd say at least 3x faster from indoor to outdoor. Indoor to Outdoor is about the same as pre-patch Outdoor to Indoor was for me which is a huge improvement. Loading from save is also a good bit faster, although the clips themselves seem very choppy with low FPS, but thats mainly because my CPU is pegged at 100% (normally 70-80% with just Witcher) while FRAPs is recording. Haven't really played to see about the crashing issue but didn't have any problems on start-up.
Update:
Compared the load times from an auto-save outside of Triss' House:
Pre-Patch: 32 seconds
Post-Patch: 18 seconds
Margin of error is ~1s, from the frame I clicked OK to a frame within the second where the load screen fades into the loaded screen. Both loads were done after I had already zoned in and out of Triss' a few times.
Also compared load times from indoor to outdoor at Triss':
Pre-Patch: 11-12 seconds
Post-Patch: 1st load 10s, 6-7s on 2nd and 3rd loads.
Unfortunately I didn't record the first cold load pre-patch, but the first cold load was 25s post-patch. Also gonna keep an eye on RAM usage and see how high it goes.