Since, the original thread has been locked because it reached the forum's thread length limit, I've decided to keep the discussion going. While the issue is now very well documented, the original thread captured much of the scope of the problem, more importantly (ignoring a few wannabe shills and corporate drones) the discussions were civil, and sympathetic.

My problem with Skyrim started once my save file reached 8mb (after about 20 hours of exploring. I barely touched the main quest, but rather explored the lands and imagined my Orc being a great hunter, scouring the lands). As of Thursday, I haven't touched Skyrim again, and much like many of you are waiting for fix.

I've replied multiple times in that thread on the degradation of my game's performance. I'm about 42 hours in with 11mb on my one and only game save. Last night I manually saved a game at Whiterun, sold my goods I had collected on a previous quest, went up to Skyforge and bought a single smiting level and then fast traveled to a cave I had already located to start my next quest. When I arrived there I again manually saved and my save file jumped to 11mb. I just saved 5 minutes previously and tipped 10mb?!? I reduced my inventory (I'm only carrying 85lbs. worth of gear at this point) and didn't discover any new territory, how did I jump 1mb in such a short time?

It's very difficult to pin this down.
Sometimes I can be halfway through a large dungeon and the size only goes up by a paltry 50-100KB.
Then one time after receiving a quest entry in my journal, it went up by 300.
Neither of those two scenarios are consistent though.
ARRRGGH.