Way too many ‘visits’ after upgrade

After updating to the most current release I now see 2~3x more page visits and about 2x more visitors shown than before the past 3 days. A review of the raw logs does not show any additional increase in visitor traffic to cause this, in fact on that box weekend traffic is typically very light. What changes in the release could cause this?

Background: The week before I had updated to the problem release eon this site, but then disabled that for a week waiting the current one which otherwise seems fine. [minor: I did see that a monthly calendar is being displayed ‘backwards’ on one report page.] On this machine are two WP sites (the second is “inside” the file path of the first and is now running the current release and sees no problems). Also on this machine are a number of pages that are outside of WP and some php scripts that are used to for machine-2-machine processing (licensee validation and support services).

Is is possible that WP Statistics is now tracking access to those other resources in a way that in the prior editions it was not? If so, can this be disabled? I am completely puzzled as to why the new stats are all pumped up this way.