A Papyrus Log do they call it?

I'm tired of crashing. I mean, I'd actually like to play the game for once. Random. Sometimes it'll CTD in the inventory, system menu or map... other times it's just fine. Or in the wilderness. When it doesn't CTD, it just freezes.... which I'm experiencing again now with Dawnguard installed. This really discourages me to mod any further. I won't be able to test or see anything in the game... and Skyrim becomes worthless.

If you're suggesting WRYE or BOSS, please don't. They're great tools, but I don't use them.

You know there's a reason most people do use them.

Well, that's your issue right there No reason not to use those bad boys, other than laziness

Jokes aside, http://www.creationkit.com/FAQ:_My_Script_Doesn%27t_Work%21#My_Script_compiles.2C_but_doesn.27t_work.21_How_can_I_debug_this.3F's the way to set up your papyrus log. However, in my experience, it only rarely helps in diagnosing random CTDs, but it's worth a shot.

Ah, yes.

I only have one log in there and inside it says 3/24/2012 all the way through it. INI refreshing must have reverted it back to default. Time to create a new log, I guess!

Well that was fast. Crashed when bringing up the System Menu again. I hate this game so much.

{edit} I mean, I just hate it.

I very much agree with Arkangel...a log is not likely going to help, and as usefull as Wyre and BOSS are (I use them), they probably aren't going to help the issue either. From my experience helping people trouble shoot with my mod, most random crashes are resource related, not mod conflicts.

Here's a step from my mod's (ScenicCarriages) Trouble Shooting steps:
3. Rename your Skyrim.INI AND SkyrimPrefs.INI and let Skyrim make new, clean INI files. Test again.

Most really random problems seem to trace back to resource issues which usually stem from INI changes... and check out this link:
http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/633229-less-ctds-maybe-none

That thing just logs scripts doesn't it?

You would get a error log (And more) but it might not be enough since it's just the scripts that it checks, it's not quite the same as the error log that say Morrowind provided.

List of mods, load order and if you are using any ini tweaks would also help, RAM usage could be useful to know too.
(I hover around 3GB usage currently and above 2.5 things can be a bit unstable in my experience, mostly mods and tweaks which results in this usage but I'm not altering the uGrids value as that would be too much with the other settings used, no hardware AA either and instead I'm relying on SMAA.)

Interesting, thanks.

I'm fairly confident in my Skyrim.ini tweaks and they've been working for the longest of time, but it could be a number of things such as mods or nVidia settings altogether. I've tried all things and I'm not sure which method works because it's so random. I will try generating new INI files again and see what happens.

One thing I truly worry about is that older mods having older esp's might not work well with newer Skyrim versions. Like suddenly I just want to disable all mods that aren't meant for 1.7, for example.


{edit} Skyrim crashes immediately during loading without the INI files.

I get a black screen freeze every now and then, turned out that was due to a known problem with current drivers for the 7970 and possibly entire 7000 series even if 12.6 was supposed to have solved it (I'm on some 12.8 beta I guess it is.) so yeah troubleshooting can be quite difficult, mod conflicts for example would probably be minimized by proper load order but if two plugins modify the same thing then one of them will of course override the other depending on load order, usually it's minor and doesn't cause stability problems but if scripts are involved or other more sensitive data then that changes things a bit.

EDIT:

Patch 1.6 changed (fixed) a Navmesh (AI navigation / pathfinding data, I can't describe it very well.) related problem (finally) and that required the affected mods to be re-saved by the 1.6 based Creation Kit (With patch 1.7 only the exe was altered so I don't think we'll get a update to the editor yet, would be nice for some features currently used but unavailable for editing - for example in Dawnguard.) anyway back to this without those updates the affected mods can be unstable.

Patch also changed some script behavior which required changes to several mods and utilities like SKSE, I got a crash from a mannequin fix due to this because I failed to notice it had been updated - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/10652 - so there's probably a few mods affected by this as well.

Even worse would probably be the older mods made via third party utilities, TESVSnip was found out to cause certain edits lead to record corruption which resulted in various glitches in the actual game.


These are just some suggestions, there's many other things to consider like just what you mentioned about drivers being up to date and working correctly or VRAM usage when using several texture mods, bad models (.nif) files can also be unstable such as seen with early releases of some of the parallax enabling mods.



That thing about Skyrim crashing without a ini file is weird though, rename Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and run the launcher, it should use the game folder skyrim_default.ini as a preset and yield a new Skyrim and SkyrimPrefs.ini file correctly but maybe you've altered uGridsToLoad from the default of 5 to say 7 or 9 instead?
(Those edits store in the save game and crashes the game if you try to load that data without some edits first via SaveIni and Set commands - and something else I've forgotten - to reset the value back to five.)


EDIT: I'm not expert or anything like that though, these are just general suggestions at best, might help somewhat at least, there's probably a lot of stuff I've missed to mention though and a lot of other possible reasons why you're getting these issues.