» Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:41 am Not a terribly unique thread title I know, but I've done my best to keep track of details so hopefully someone here will have some ideas.
I got Skyrim just a few weeks after release in late 2011 on Steam, and have been running it with no major problems since. A while back I installed a couple mods - one to change the look of Nightingale armor (though I don't remember the name and it's not a data file but an object replacement) and one to lighten the weight of dragon bones. This was at least a year ago and things proceeded smoothly. Lately I'd started to notice some lipsynch errors and dialogue stuttering but from what I've read these are fairly common 1.9 issues, and they didn't bug me too terribly. Several days ago I bought and installed Dawnguard from Steam. I played through the entire main Dawnguard plot with no major issues. It was not until yesterday morning that the game really started acting up.
The laptop I use to play has an HDMI out and I recently got a new TV, so I hooked up the PC to the TV to play on the big screen. For controls, I used the MotionInJoy 360 Controller emulator and a DualShock 3 attached via USB. I've done that before with no issues and for about 40-60 minutes everything was fine. At that point, with no apparent cause and no other warning signs or glitches, I heard the sound of a Windows error message popping up (though there was no message) and the game froze entirely save for the sound, which kept playing. I had to terminate the process via Task Manager.
I disconnected the laptop from the TV, disconnected the controller and reverted to the mouse and keyboard setup, and tried again. As before, the game ran perfectly (save the typical 1.9 glitches) until about 40-60 minutes had passed, when it froze in the same manner with the same sound. I tried simply rebooting the computer and playing again, and encountered an identical issue. Thinking it may have been a driver issue I updated my graphics card driver to the latest version and tried once more. At this point I also started timing the length of play to see if the freezes happened in a predictable fashion. This time the game did not freeze, but silently crashed to desktop after just 5 minutes.
I'd read somewhere that Skyrim did not require Steam running to play, and so quit Steam and launched the executable directly. Steam launched anyway but the game did not crash. It did, however, freeze in the same manner as the first few incidents after 80 minutes. Several hours later I decided to try the same tactic again with no changes to check for consistency. I got a silent crash to desktop after 16 minutes.
All of the freezes and crashes happened in entirely different locations and times during different quests. Only one was during any "strenuous" activity (the first one was during a battle with a dragon). I have no idea what it is that determines whether it crashes or freezes, how long it takes to do so, or what is causing either one to happen.
I'm willing to try uninstalling mods or reinstalling the game if need be, but I was wondering if anyone had any alternate theories or ideas. If it had happened soon after I installed a mod or Dawnguard it would make more sense to me, but the only change that coincided with the start of my issues was playing on the TV, and I've no idea how that would destabilize the game even once it was unplugged from the external display.
