My experience has been that latency is just a fact of life with Audacity. Before it may have just been short enough that you didn't notice it. It tends to be consistent with the same equipment though. (So unless you change something, that second of latency will always be a second.)
Last time I did any serious tracking with Audacity, I just got in the habit of manually trimming the first .2 sec off the beginning of each track after recording it.
Of course with a full second of latency, you might have something misconfigured. What's your recording buffer set at? (Go to Preferences->Recording to check)