I've just started my new playthrough and guess what? Yep, CTDs practically every time I get to those damned wolves south of Riverwood! I can't remember, are they a part of vanilla Skyrim, or are they added by a mod? All I know is it's practically a dead cert that I'm going to have a CTD as soon as I come in contact with them! The only time I got past them it locked up almost straight after! I understand that the area is notorious because it's got a built in fault with areas in the map all trying to load at once?

They are there in plain ol' vanilla.

Yup vanilla Skyrim. It's there when I played my 360 and were there when I played on PC before I modded it.

Somehow I doubt that the wolves are causing the crash.

Cyber Wolves. They have a special ability to get into your game/steam account and cause it to error and then begin to feast upon your freshly slain body. I understand, the same happened to me.

Yeah there's something about the spot that makes it crash prone. Used to get it myself in the past pretty often, but not in a long while now

As I said in my post I doubted it was the wolves, but rather something to do with what I heard about some sort of area loading bug. Then again, it is pretty coincidental that it happens as soon as you meet them, so much so that I turned off my SkyTest to see if it was that. Nope, still CTDed. They must be right on top of where the areas meet causing the crash, 'cause up until then I had absolutely no troubles whatsoever. Any mods available that could stop this?

That won't work. The Papyrus scripting used by Skyrim "bakes" data into our saves. SkyTest is very heavily scripted. Most of its data will remain inside your saves.

To accurately test whether the problem is caused by SkyTest you will need to disable it and start a new game.