Hey Everyone,

I've scoured the Internet in search of an answer to a problem that has plagued my game for several weeks to no avail and so I turn to you. I'm beginnning to worry that my problem is unique to my system and that I may never get it fixed. Here goes:

Shortly after Bethesda released the construction set and the official high-res texture pack, I noticed a strange flickering effect around in-game flames. For instance, torches and burning buildings would blink on and off. I noticed other things, too, like hair on the bellies of horses and wolves that didn't seem attached to their respective bodies. So I did what any good PC gamer does, and turned to the Internet. I learned that the problem might have been related to my system which was running in crossfire with (2) Radeon HD 5750s. I don't have my official specs in front of me--I'm on my wife's laptop--but here's a quick summary of my system:

• AMD Athlon II X4 Quad-Core 3.0Ghz
  
• 4GB GSkill Ram
  
• Windows 7 Professional
  
• (2) Radeon HD 5750 (with Crossfire bridge)

Anyway, I had never had any problems before with crossfire enabled (with the exception of the game not dimming as it should when I looked at the sun, etc.) so I tried disabling the texture pack. No dice. So then, I tried disabling crossfire. That's when everything went horribly wrong. Instantly I noticed that something was amiss wth the main menu of the game (not the launcher). The text had switched to a Comic Sans-y font and it was no longer dynamic. You know how when you roll your mouse over the word "Continue" it grows larger than the rest of the menu. That simply no longer worked. On the upside, the lighting effects in the game seemed to be working, but I just couldn't get past the broken text in the game.

So, I figured I had already beaten the game--which is to say I sunk a good chunk of time into it, slew the end boss, and was approaching level 50--so I decided to give it some time to see if a new driver would fix the problem. Fast forward three weeks to when AMD released driver version 12.2 and suddenly the game's worse than ever. Literally everything in the game was pixelated. I did some research and at last decided to uninstall Skyrim, then my video drivers (complete with a Driver Sweeper run in safe mode after uninstalling AMD CCC). I then re-installed an older driver (12.2 preview version, if I'm not mistaken). That fixed the new pixelated issue, but the menus are still broken.

Sorry, I know I've written a lot. I don't mean to be long-winded, but I want to make sure I cover my bases. I realize this is a stupid thing to get hung up on, but I can't stand playing a game that I know I've broken in some way. I've considered the possibility that installing a MOD like Skyrim UI (or whatever it's called) might resolve the issue, but I actually want to play the vanilla version of the game once more before I go mod-crazy. Has anyone else here ever seen or heard of this issue before? Is it possible that I'm overlooking some super-silly setting or something?

Thank you so much in advance for your responses. I'm expecting plenty of TLDRs, but I hope there's at least one person out there willing to lend me a hand.

Thanks!

Okay, I tried SkyrimUI (complete with the script extender), but that didn't do it either. I am now completely out of ideas.

Hmm, after playing around with the custom application profiles in the AMD control center and configuring it to automatically disable (as far as I understand) crossfire at Skyrim's launch, I seem to have fixed the menu text issue. Words now enlarge when selected (by keyboard at least) and the font is back to normal.

I still have troubles getting lighting to adjust properly when looking directly at the sun. I notice that a pupil-adjustment effect is very obvious on the Xbox version of the game, but mine seems minimal at best. If anyone has any recommendations on that, I'd be much obliged. If not, I'll just let this post die out.