I have the PC version and updated it when the new patch came out, and now I am unable to lockpick. I have 70 lockpicks and its up to level 20 something. What to do?

Just use whatever movement keys you rebound A and D to. In my case it was the left and right arrows. It still shows A and D but just about all the other menus are still bugged like that.

No, I had this also.

When this happened, the movement keys would not rotate the lock. And, worse, TAB would not let me exit from lockpicking. I had to restart the game and go back to a previous save.

And then, after that, I had a number of crashes for a short while.

I think the problem here is that Skyrim is not designed to work when its files are being changed. So things go wrong when Steam pushes out a change.

I wish that, for games like Skyrim, Steam offered us a "notify of available updates" option, where we had to manually choose when the updates get downloaded. (Hopefully they already lock out downloads while the game is active, but because I was using a 4GB variation, to avoid other crashing problems, I imagine that that mechanism failed to work. Script extenders might have similar issues, or I would take this opportunity to vocally wish for LAA support in the distributed exe.)

Yep, that's what I had changed my 'strafe' keys to and was a bit confused after the patch when the A and D keys were suddenly disabled. No biggie when I clued in what the deal was. I didn't have any issues with the tab key or crashes..

You're probably correct in this assumption, as i haven't had any issues here (unmodded game).

After sleeping on this...

First, I was playing a copy of the binary steam gave me on Nov 11 (with the LAA bit enabled) when I saw the lockpick problem. And, steam was running. In retrospect that's probably a bad combination. I have preferred that setup because previously it gave me the fewest problems but that was when steam was not updating the game.

Second, in general, pcs are wildly different from each other. And, this is a big game. So, already, some people are going to see problems that other people will not see. When you combine this with bugs that happen only at certain times of the day, it makes comparing bug experiences quite difficult.

Third, ... and then there's mods... managing them and especially new bugs they can introduce is going to be frustrating, because we do not have any tools for isolating bugs, nor for automated testing after changes.

There is a bug though going on. As soon as the patch installed, my arrow keys no longer function in game for the menus. I can rebind them to the movement and they work, and they work outside of the game so it's not a hardware issue.

Use the old Interface.bsa file. Should be floating around somewhere.