Sadly, the patch offers nothing other than nag-removal.
The issue of growing orphans is now almost up to 100%, thus, someone is/has created a fork attack. Have not found one pool without low orphans, and reward is about 0%-25% of the speculated diff rates. Thus, if the chart says you will earn an estimated 1000 per day, expect to get 0-250, if you can find a pool that is not hitting orphan after orphan after orphan.
This is only partly to do with the programs code, and more to do with the direct attacks that are feeding real pools invalid data to slow them down, while the attacker is building block after block on his private chain, invalidating all the legitimate blocks along the way.
(Within the same pool, blocks are orphaning with identical numbers, which is physically impossible with get-work, unless the coin code is messed-up. EG, user A finds block 12345 and then 2 min later, user B finds block 12345, which is obviously an orphan, but impossible as the pool has already found block 12345 and switched to block 12346... Thus, the attack. Purposely submitting fake data, to stall the pool, and the wallet/qt allowing that to be an acceptable submission. It shouldn't have ever been accepted in the first place, to have been resubmitted as an orphan.)
I have not experienced these problems with orphans. Which pools have you tried? Multipool.in and epool work well for me. I get 85% of estimate or so.