Of course I have to actually\ get it running first...my first two attempts brought up something called the "Steam Client Service" window, which I've never seen on any of my steam games (Half Life, Portal, etc). and when I click "Play" on the Skyrim popup with the nicely rendered mountainscape, the computer thinks about it a bit, then the Skyrim popup closes and...nothing happens. No game, no nothing. Tried it twice so far, about to try a third time.
Saying do not update did NOT work for me. Bethesda's instructions to steam involved the first part of patch being the trigger which is why if it just starts up and you stop it you still cannot play as the most important bit gets done first. After the patch it switched me back to auto-update. The only thing I can think of is a combo no update with offline.
Kinda sad that even atari and EA can patch games and not have their customer base pratically begging for them to take them back.