Having played the game vanilla for a while, a couple of weeks ago I eventually relented and installed about a dozen. Since then, my Skyrim experience has become very buggy to say the least. One particularly frustrating example is that sometimes my character becomes sort of "detached" from the terrain and can walk through walls, the floor, or even up into the sky...(more on that latter). However, I realised that I had far bigger problems when I travelled to Falkreath and found that Dengeir had already been reinstated as Jarl, despite not having even started the Stormcloak quest to liberate Falkreath yet, which is the proper point where Dengeir is supposed to reclaim his title. I played on for a little while longer, but then found another peculiar bug in Riften. Inside the Thieves Guild Cistern (the round room where the beds are), I found that the locked vault door was now open, which I believe, as with the Dengeir bug, is also premature.

The only explanation that comes to my mind is to do with the "detachment" bug that I mentioned at the beginning. Rather than exit the game to desktop and reload as I should have, I tried loading an earlier saved game in the Greybeard castle (High Hrothgar). As I had the ability to walk in the air, I did a silly thing and walked to the peak of the mountain, at which point I "discovered" The Throat of the World which completed that quest prematurely. I didn't, however, save the game at that point, I just exited to desktop and reloaded from where I was before. It was only much later that I noticed the other bugs. Is it possible that discovering The Throat of the World without completing the necessary quests has somehow broken the game? Despite the fact that I didn't save and continue from that point? Is it possible to corrupt unrelated save games in this way? The thing that makes me think it could have is that the saved game immediately before the Greybeard one doesn't have the Dengeir bug. However, after I tried replaying the game from there, the bug has happened again by itself. *rage*

I've invested a lot of time to get this far in the game, and I dread the thought of having to restart. I suppose I could continue playing and ignore it, but I'm worried that there may come a time later on where the whole game becomes FUBAR.

if anyone else has had these problems occur, or if you have some advice on what I should do to fix it, your advice will be most welcome.