Skyrim has been running at five or less FPS on the lowest settings despite the fact that my computer meets the recommended settings.

My specs:
i5-2400 3.1 GHz processor
16 Gb DDR3 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 6850
Windows 7 64 bit

It runs other games perfectly well, too. I can max out the settings on Oblivion with pretty minimal lag, but this is completely unplayable. Any thoughts of what might be wrong?

I've got the same problem with these specs:

CPU: Intel? Core? i3-390M 2.667GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M with 1024MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Memory: 4096MB RAM
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
Resolution: 1366x768px

Not at all as good as yours, but we have the exact same problem I guess.
Try e-mailing them for support via www.gamesas.com to let them know about your problem.
Costumer feedback is important so they can sort it out in an upcoming patch.

Hmmm that is very strange. I have an almost identical system to yous aside from the fact that I'm running two 6850's and I have only 8 GB DDR3 RAM. However, I'm able to run high settings with everything turned up to max except shadows ( basically almost ultra) and AA (for some reason if I turn that on textures on the ground glitch up and go crazy.) I get a stable 60 fps in whiterun and during dragon fights with occasional dips down to 48 fps. I'm running 11.10 CCC and my GPU is OC'ed to 875/1110. I haven't done any ini tweaks however I did drop this .dll in my Skyrim folder that is supposed to allow crossfire to semi-work.

I run it on ultra 20-30 FPS, 1920x1080
shadows on high, decal quantiy on medium, distant object detial fade OFF, with detial set to high AA set to 4, and antiropic set to 4.

specs

4 gigs DDR2 RAM
2.8 GHZ processor
WIN7 Home Prem. 64 bit
Raedon 5670 1 gig DDR5

Update drivers, defrag HDD, make sure only vital PC background tasks are running, set everything else off. Free up as much PC resources.

Given how CPU dependent this game is, try these 3 possible "fixes"

Turn off "SpeedStep" in your bios, which should force your CPU back to full speed all the time.

Then re-run the laucher and click "default" to detect your cpu speed properly.

Try turning OFF AA and reduce or turn OFF shadows which may be adding to CPU load. (FXAA should be ok)

Please report back if any of this helps.

*cough* Drivers *cough*

How come nobody ever mentions those? Video drivers should always be the first thing you update when you get a new game on launch day. Make sure you have the latest drivers. And if you have problems, you should always mention in your specs if you're using the latest drivers or not.