So ive been playing Skyrim since day 2 of its release.It has never EVER crashed or froze on me.Never once.Until I installed Hearthfire.Now the game freezes randomly.Ive turned off all mods,turned off Dawnguard and HF but its still freezes.The audio can still be heard playing in a loop.I then have to ctrl+alt+delete&--#62;taskmanager to kill Skyrim.
I should have known better as soon as I installed HF the game started to get glitchy.Flashes in the sky when mounting\unmounting a horse,manneqquins appearing and disappearing.

Really uncool,it happened on a 200+hr character.Im just hoping the next update can fix it or my Skyrim days are over.Now I think ill go and put up with more bugs (surprise!) in Dishonored

EXACTLY what I have experienced. Had maybe one or two CTD issues since the release of Skyrim even with mods, and NEVER any issue like this where the game just freezes and sits there forever. Then I install Hearthfire, and it is suddenly unplayable. Literally every 5 minutes the game hard locks. Also there is about a 50% chance that when changing cells, it will stall out on the load screen and never load. Really frustrating.

EDIT: I am in the process of cleaning every single mod I use including Update.esm, Dawnguard.esm, and Hearthfires.esm, after a fresh install, and will start a new character with only the Bethesda DLC's enabled to test and report back if that solves the problem.

UPDATE: So far, after following the http://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=TES5Edit_Cleaning_Guide_-_TES5Edit and cleaning all my loaded mods starting with Update.esm, then Dawnguard.esm, Hearthfires.esm, and the rest with the latest http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/25859/, I was able to play for a good 40 minutes without a single lockup or CTD. I cleaned my own http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24235/ plugin as well, and re-uploaded the new version. Here's to hoping that's a sign of better things to come!