Whenever I press 'B' to bring up the menu during gameplay it freezes. Been like this for a couple of years but I am currently getting back into playing Skyrim but this is driving me mad. I've tried to delete the cache but this worked to no avail.

The only thing that works is pressing the Xbox guide button after pressing B and then pressing the guide button again, then there is no freeze. This is ok but gets very annoying after a while.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Do you have autosaves enabled? If so, the "save on character menu" option is causing the game to pause (freeze) while it autosaves your game. I would highly recommend disabling all auto save options* (Save on Rest, Save on Wait, Save on Travel, and Save on Character Menu), because due to the way the developers implemented this feature, it is highly likely that it will eventually lead to game save corruption. The downside is that you have to remember to save manually on a regular basis, but in my opinion, this is a small price to pay in order to reduce the chances of game save corruption.

* Press start to get the main menu. go to the screen where it says: save, load and settings. Go to settings; there should be gameplay, display and audio. Go to gameplay; there should be save on...travel...wait...rest... de-selecting the symbol next to each will turn them off. In the case of save on character, set it to disabled.