After patch, both Auto Save and my save game (I had gotten close to the end) seem to be corrupted. Upon loading either one, no controls work, inventory and gold are set to zero. Is there any way to retrieve the save games?

Did you use an installer or Galaxy for the original install? If you still have an older installer you can try reinstalling that. It "shouldn't" affect your save games. I don't know it will help, but it's best I've got.

Used the Galaxy installer. I'm about to bite the bullet and start over.

I've run into something similar to this with the autosave when the game crashes on me, but never a manual save game. There are no characters in the party, and the map window is white. Do you have an earlier save game? I generally keep a different save for each floor of the dungeon I'm on, just in case something like that happens. Worst case scenario is I lose one floor of progress, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of things.