Sony has confirmed our suspicions by revealing that the recent firmware upgrade for PS3 had no effect on European consoles.
The version 1.92 patch was released to tinker with stability and compatibility issues with US and Japanese games only, we were told.
"All the changes in the firmware update were for the US and Japan, and actually had no effect for us in Europe," a spokesperson for Sony Europe told Eurogamer.
We now feel a little silly for staying up all night trying to work out what had changed.