The topic title says it, mostly. I have been playing this game relatively smoothly since November 2016. I don't use my PC for hardly anything but Skyrim and internet. I click PLAY, it continues to the next menu, I click CONTINUE, and then Start from previous save...then the Skyrim logo and theme music play to infiniti. I have not made any add-ons nor Mods. I played this game lovingly for a long time and now I can't seem to continue.

Do you have anythnig running in the background? I had this same problem, and found that windows update was messing around doing I don't know what but it definitely wasnt updating. I killed the process and the game ran fine. so the first thing to do is look for any processes that are taking up huge amounts of memory. Task Manager > Show Processes From All Users and then sort by memory or CPU used. If something is taking up a lot, that may be the problem.

Does this happen on a previous save?