I'm having the same problem. Up until yesterday, the launcher was working fine, and then it started downloading some 120Mb update. I shut it down, relaunched it and it worked fine until this evening, where it started downloading the 36Gb patch. I'm in EU (France), usually playing on StarForge and my ISP is FreeTelecom. Why is this happening?
EDIT: Now I also get the "game version not matching the server's" error message, but I can still log on my toon...