After installing Dawnguard, my gave is unplayable. I have several quest lines in progress that I cannot finish. Let me give an example of what happens. Doing the dawnguard quests I am doing Prophet where you find a moth priest. Well I found him in the holdout, killed all the dawnguard around, but cannot deactive the barrier. Why? Because this item you take from the guy, the focus, is not in his inventory. I see the arrow over his head, I search his inventory, but it just is not there. Another example was doing Molag Bol's quest. When he gives you the mace, it does not show up in my inventory anywhere. In this instance the next time I started the ps3 and loaded my game it showed up, but this does not work when its another characters inventory. I have several quest lines that I cannot finish now due to a note that isnt on someone it is supposed to be, or a note that vanishes when I pick it up, or missing items that are needed. I cant even do thieves guild exra jobs because the, for example, whatever chest/strongbox I go to to steal something, it bugs and the item is hidden. Anyone know what to do? My game is unplayable.

I have two toons going through DG.

(a) Vampire Lord - Level 32, 60 hours, vampire, dark brotherhood listener, oblivion walker
(B ) Werewolf - level 35, 91 hours, companions, civil war, married, DragonBorn-mq

With both I'm experiencing a fair bit more stuttering 'doing' Dawnguard than I was previously.

In fact ( B ) went through the Dragonborn MQ effortlessly and with marvelous performance. But now that toon is getting stuttering and slideshow like framerates with some regularity. I would say about every 30 min or so I get a couple wtf minutes of play. It is almost as bad as pre-1.4 fps hits, but not quite and it recovers without a reset (and much less profanity).

Also NPC schedules are utterly borked. I tried waiting 10 days inside the solitude stables but I still got kids running about Solitude at 2 AM and the Riften shop owners in place at odd hours.

I've also got a few merchants who I can never get into barter mode. I just get no dialog option for it anymore, regardless of time or what they are doing.

Lastly, I loaded up my level 50 character who hasn't been touched since before any DLC was installed. I loaded the save and let the game stew for about 10 minutes (just idling in a building). The save went from 8.5mb -&--#62; 9.7mb just from that. Probably shouldn't be a big surprise but thought I'd mention it.

Dawnguard has been a bit of a mixed bag for me, I got through the main quest without any major issues, except quite a lot of stuttering and lag during an area in the last quest which forced me to restart my PS3 and load up Skyrim again. That seemed to fix it and I got through the rest of the quest okay, but now whenever I'm anywhere in Skyrim a lot of stuttering/lag kicks in after about half an hour of play which makes the game unplayable for me, it's particularly noticeable in Whiterun. I'm using a level 65 character that was created on patch 1.5. I'm hoping patch 1.9 will help, I'm not keen on losing another character to the lag.

It's Dawnguard for sure. Reinstalling all but Dawnguard = no lag.

Sometimes when you feed on someone through the vampire seduction method, your character (not the game) just freezes.

These are my issues for Dawngaurd:

1. It rains dead dragons in solitude, and they don't dissapear. This isn't a major problem, but is a bit annoying.

2. The game thinks I'm a vampire, even though I'm a werewolf. After fast travelling, it tells me my 'vampire blood' boils in sunlight, but I don't take damage and I can become a werewolf at any time. Again, not a major problem, but annoying.

3. My stamina now doesnt't regen by itself. THIS is a problem.

Please Fix Bethesda, you delayed the DLC enough.

This occurred before the 1.9 patch:
After a vampire attack in Riften, I tried to do A Daedra's Best Friend quest with Barbas, but the vampires in Haemar's shame are now all non-hostile. The thralls attack me while all the vampires act as normal NPCs and just run in fear as all attacks on them are counting as assaults. Going to Haemar's shame on any of my saves before Riften results in normal vampire behavior.
After the patch, the later saves are still bugged. I can only go back to that earlier save before that last vampire attack.

DRAIN VITALITY bug that affected PC / X BOX is in ps3 version get all MARKED FOR DEATH shout first then install DAWNGUARD if starting new CARAC