Has Anet made any announcement about all this trouble?

Prophecies and Factions run just fine for me, but right now Nightfall won't even load (stuck in Buknar), despite playing regularly since it came out (and after the patch). Surely, with so many issues this can't be individual users problems. My computer is pretty darn good, well defragged, etc. etc. and now I can't even play Nightfall. Surely Anet knows about all this and we can expect some sort of announcement...surely...

Could you please describe in greater detail where you are running into the issue and what is happening? I don't think problem is widespread enough for people to be instantly familiar with it.

At a guess, I would say the gw.dat file is corrupt (aka re-install). But Kimbot is right, provide more information as to what exactly happening.

Sure.

About 6 PM CST last night, when playing Nightfall my computer would crash everytime I entered a load pt. At first, I could restart and continue playing. Later, though, I couldn't leave a load point and as of this morning, I couldn't even load Nightfall without it crashing. Meanwhile, I could still play Prophecies and Factions with absolutely no problems. I suppose it "could" be me, but based on the other postings, I get the impression the issue may be fairly rampant. I can look later tonight as to what the specific "errors" are when it crashes on me. I've plenty of memory, x1600 gpu, more than enough power, run xp, updated drivers, etc.

There have been issues where a large update or a series of smaller updates would cause several issues:

a) Unable to connect when logging in
b) Unable to warp/load from a specific town.

It was due to an update to the files that did not xfer correctly.
Again, this may not be the case.