I bought Skyrim and the 3 official DLCs a week ago off of STEAM. No mods installed, just the official game and DLCs. Issues:

1.Sometimes the game will crash to desktop shortly after beginning gameplay.

2. Also, if I exit the game, and then soon attempt to re-launch the game, I get a message of "Preparing to Launch" but it won't launch for about 5 mins.

I have attempted all of fixes suggested in Help. There doesn't seem to be a problem identified when I do those fixes.

Windows8.1 64bit

Radeon HD 7800 2gb memory

WDC VR 1T

16 GB system memory

I think this problem is common a quick browse on internet reveals, but I didn't see any fix for it.

If anyone can help, I'd appreciate it. Thanxs.

I might recommend a complete reinstall if you've already done a game cache verify.

Manually delete the Skyrim directory after you remove local content if you do a reinstall.

Probably your saved games are being uploaded to Steam Cloud. Depending on how many saves you made, and your internet upload speed, it can take a while. You should be able to see a notification that the game is synchronizing, next to the game's title on the Steam library list.

Are all your hardware drivers up to date? Are you playing on a laptop that has one of those dual GPU configurations (the Radeon for games, an integrated graphics chipset for everything else)?

Please post a Dxdiag - instructions on how to do this are http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1122570-how-to-dxdiag/.

This may be right. I did notice the sync., but didn't really know what it meant. Doesn't acct. for crashes to desktop, but fortunately those are not too often.

Can someone guide me on how to play offline? Will I loose my savegames if I play off Steam? Would playing offline resolve this issue?

Note, that I have a few other games on STEAM, but never had this issue before. Of course, Skyrim is a mega size game.