It crashed on the first load. It crashed on the second load. I looked up a fix and I was told that the 'magic' fix was setting the generic sound settings to 16bit 44.1Khz which enabled me into the initial 'on the wagon' intro at least. Then while I'm supposedly having my head cut off as the Dragon lands on the tower to cast all fury on those below it the game freezes. Try all the 'fixes', nothing works. Replace sound board, doesn't work. Run the game in minimal settings in windowed mode and it begins working (trawled through all the "help" suggestions, only one mentions running it in minimal) it works! SO to play the game I have to run it in 800x600 mode windowed mode!

Steam doesn't want to talk to me, says I need to talk to Bethesda to get a refund.

Now on these boards literally expecting Bethesda to say how much they don't care.

Probably the worst spent ￡35 I have ever shelled out.

Win9 64bit, MA-770 Gigabyte, 8 Mb Ram, 6750 ATi 2Gig card Xonar D2 sound (tested on Realtek on board, crash happened exactly same instance).

So Bethesda, Valve fails to provide contact information despite having to adhere to the Distance Selling act...whats your excuse?

Win9? 8 MB Ram? Yeah... definately a troll. xD

Skyrim is amazing on sooo many levels. Just saying.

Firstly this is not the software issue forums.
Secondly get more information on your setup.
Your currently lacking :
CPU (speed / model)
HDD setup
Graphics driver version
Your ram either is 8mbs and your trolling or 8gbs.
Display setup, if its a 1080p monitor then just say that...

I can't say my guess would be anything near right, but as it stands if your crashing to desktop IE no BSOD I'd suggest updating video drivers, and go after a Xonar D2 driver update as well just to be safe.
Secondly run a benchmark and see if your coming somewhat close to something equal to your setup. Thirdly it could be that either the installation went wrong, or the download is corrupt.

I'm on a somewhat better system, and never had a crash whatsoever, and I'm using a ATI card as well, so don't let people throw that excuse at you. It might be the model of the card, but ati and Nvidia cards are capable of running skyrim without to much of a issue.