It's certainly possible something else is going on. Since it happened on two computers, I sort of doubt it's anything I'd done tinkering around (my laptop is relatively clean / tinker free), and I wouldn't know how to override the ssl path anyway. I definitely did the steps outlined in your first post correctly, copied and pasted that line exactly... And that worked just fine until the update (though the timing could be a coincidence?)
The only thing I can think of is that I use a couple of pretty outdated addons, namely ofxTwitter and ofxHttpUtils, and I'm pretty sure they both use openssl. The latter especially has given me other issues in the past. Could this have anything to do with it?