Hey everyone,

Since the 1.3 patch I cannot enter some indoor locations, because they give me infinite loading screens, with just the swirling smoke (no other models).
These locations include Snapleg cave and some other caves. I have tested with multiple characters, and it does not matter if I've been to the location before or not, it never loads.
I can enter other caves and buildings normally with no problems.

Can anyone help me with this?

EDIT, more info:

I have tried waiting it out. An hour later it was still stuck on the swirling smoke screen.
I tried loading older saves; every save I have does not allow me to enter Snapleg cave, Lost Knife cave, and others. Even a savegame I loaded from the very beginning of the game, then used the console to cheat my way to the cave in question, did not work.
I deleted the ini's and let the game rebuild them: no dice.
I have tried lowering graphical detail: no dice.
I have tried PCB: no dice.

I can now confirm that it has nothing to do with my saves: I have started a completely new game, and when entering the first indoor area during the dragon attack, I get the same infinite swirling smoke loading screen. I will try to reinstall Skyrim.

I am running on windows 7 64 bit, a geforce gtx 460 and intel i5 750, 4 gigs of ram.

Press the tild key to enter the console. Type PCB and press enter. See if that fixes it.

Thank you for your reply. I have already tried this, and it didn't work.

Got my first (almost) one of these yesterday. my load screens always load in about 10 seconds. Usually faster then I can read what is on the screen. I was about 8 hours into an 11 hour run and this happened. But for me it only lasted for 3 mins...yes I was patient and waited it out. I ALT/TAB'ed out,(after it loaded) and my GPU was flooded..1017 + 258 meg System RAM, and there was a huge spike for the HDD read....Not sure why it did that ..I was entering Whiterun. not fast travel . Parked horse, (Shadowmere) at Stable, and walked to the entrance. That load door, took about 3 mins, continued after the ALT/TAB for another 3 hours.

If it happens again I will Screenshot "Process Explorer" so it can be anolized.

Edit @ B1gBadDaddy....have you seen PCB work? I couldn't get it to do a thing, tried ...PCB/pcb no change. but I can clear 200+ MEG of ram on GPU with an ALT/TAB.

I can now confirm that it has nothing to do with my saves: I have started a completely new game, and when entering the first indoor area during the dragon attack, I get the same infinite swirling smoke loading screen. I will try to reinstall Skyrim.

I seem to be having a similar issue with Whiterun. If I load my Solitude save, it loads in 10-30 seconds. If I load my Whiterun auto save, it takes 5-10 minutes to load. The only difference between these 2 saves is that I started the "Day to Remember" quest. The model issue, however is reversed. Whiterun has a model, while Solitude doesn't.

I have encountered this a few times, and what has worked for me to trigger it to load is to switch to another window (such as ALT-CTRL-DELETE to get to task manager) and then switch back and I've had it load instantly almost every time.

I use that trick all the time. The problem is...it only works half the time. As for the other half...I end up staring at a Black screen for 5-10 minutes. When this happens, absolutely nothing can minimize Skyrim. If I want to do something else, I have to completely turn my computer off and restart it.

I solved it.

While trying to reinstall Skyrim, I discovered my harddisk was dying. Moved my Steam folder to another drive and voila, it works.

I too replaced my hard drive when I was having a hard time with loading and lag (as well as long OS boot times, etc), and I don't think I've experienced it nearly as much (if even at all) since doing that. So this issue is very likely related to hard disk issues.