I'm having an issue with the HUD in Skyrim. You can see some screenshots in http://imgur.com/a/Qrp5e. I installed the retail game from DVD and then the game updated itself on Steam right after the install finished.

Books can't be read, because the "front page" covers up the pages, items in the inventory can't be shown correctly and the HUD looks weird with some colours I believe shouldn't be there. It seems to me that the polygons are inverted/reversed when I look at my inventory items and when I read books. If you look at the top image of the book, you can see that the book's back is shown in the middle where normally the pages would have joined. Helmets etc. are also shown like this, but "reversed" so the inside of a helmet looks embossed rather than engraved, if you know what I mean.

There are no other graphical glitches except for this HUD issue. Has anyone else encountered this?

I'm on Windows 7 x86, Intel 2.4GHz Dual Core, 3 GiB RAM and I'm using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 card with the latest drivers (285.62/WHQL).

The game's graphics settings are set to Ultra (but with AA and AF turned off) and a 1920x1080 resolution.

I had the same problem. I fixed it by downloading the latest beta drivers.

Hat-tip to your magnificence, my good Sir. Updating to the beta drivers worked

I also noticed I had almost no disk space left on the primary OS/system disk, which could possibly be another reason why the HUD was messed up, since it could lead to not enough space temp files etc..