I turned off all the auto save options and I don't fast travel anymore. This has allowed me to start playing my main character again. But I'm out in the wilderness exploring and randomly it auto saves and BOOM! System freezes.

Is there a way to turn off this stupid feature?

If i remmeber right, skyrims auto saves every so often, set by player 5,10,15,20,30.60 mins coudl be that its under the autosave on travel

thats true but you can set it to be disabled completely, like i did, game never saves unless i save it myself. i think its either right above the save or rest ect or right below, not sure tho.

No, there's some sort of bug. I've had this at least 3 times myself and others have claimed to have had it as well. All my autosave features are disabled yet the game still randomly autosaves.

The game will autosave every so often, player set, but not during combat or when enemies are near. There appears to be a trigger for when entering the character menu to cause the auto-save. Try the auto-save options and see if the periodic save is there and set it to zero, that should disable it.

That being said, just like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the freezes aren't actually caused by saving otherwise manual saves would freeze as well. The game just simply freezes. My first freeze was 14 hours in and all I was doing was walking over a hill towards Whiterun, there were no enemies near, no wind rustling the trees or grass, it was a very still and peaceful moment. So still and peaceful in fact that Skyrim decided it would prefer to stay in that moment forever rather than allowing me to continue to Whiterun to inform the Steward that the bandit threat to the East had been dealt with and that I would like my reward paid in gold coins so I could finally buy that house he offered to sell to me.

Fortunately I had an auto-save pop only a couple of minutes after the clearing the bandits (they were in an outdoor area rather than a dungeon/cave) so the sum total of my loss was ten minutes of my own time as I restarted the console and let it do its file check and then reloaded my save, oh and a deer hide from a random deer I killed on the way up the hill. Disappointing as it was my first lock-up, but it could have been a lot worse.

Broken game is broken. Disable auto-save at your own risk.