Category Permalinks

I just upgraded to the latest CVS and the category permalinks have changed. They no longer include “/archives” in them and are not converting to all lowercase letters.
Is there an option for this on it’s way under Options->Permalinks? This is a pretty drastic change.
I don’t know about others, but I can’t use the rewrite rule because I have static pages on my site such as mtdewvirus.com/about/ and I don’t want these getting redirected to the WP index.php file with a parameter thinking it is a category.
It seemed like a pretty major change getting thrown in the mix.