» Fri Dec 16, 2011 3:02 pm
I had the same extremely annoying bug happen to two of my games. A quick googling lead me to the discovery of the wonderful world of bug-busting console commands.
If you're on a PC, go in first person, hover your targeting reticle over a Markarth guard's head (the guide I read explicitly mentioned having the head within your reticle), and press the tilde key (~). A text box will appear at the bottom of your screen, type "Paycrimegold" without the quotation marks. If you're like me, and for a while you've just been slaughtering every guard in Markarth, the payment will be quite steep. In fact, I'm fairly certain that, should you not want to lose a ton of gold to a bug, you can drop the coin somewhere, and then pay the guard with the console command and it will only remove what's in your inv. I suspect this because I was carrying around 22k, with a few odd hundred and singles, and he took ALL of it, not a predefined incremental amount (1k, 2k, 3k etc.)
That fixed their aggression and looping of the quest text for me, hope it helps you.