I was looking forward to Dawnguard, and bought it the day before yesterday. I played it a little while, do the first couple of quests, then went to bed. The next day I tried to continue playing, only to have lag spikes and saving taking forever - I checked my save file and it was over 100MB. It's unplayable. I have a previous save which is only 9.16MB which I didn't mind going back to use, but that's broken too, effectively - I can't do the Dawnguard quests without it increasing by a couple of MB every save, and eventually becoming laggy and unplayable.

Can anyone help me? Is there any way to remove the bloat from my saves? Or stop it from appearing? I just want to play the game I spent so much money on. :/

EDIT: see later posts, apologies for whiny title and first post.

i have the exact same problem. unfortunately i do not know how to fix this. my save is at 73mb and this, like your is unplayable. hopefully someone has a way of fixing this.

Chances are this is related to your mod selection and not Dawnguard.

nope. i uninstalled every mod and makes no diffrence.

The save game bloating issue is known. Or at least has been voiced already before. For future bugs, please place it here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1400758-dawnguard-pc-version-bug-list/page__st__150
The moderator BootySweat is compiling them all on a list there.

I seriously cannot believe this.. which Page of that Thread is this bug reported?

Oh my apologies, I assumed it was on there because I've seen many complaining about the same issue. But it isn't. Sorry about that.
But several posts have been made on the Nexus forums complaining of this issue.

EDIT: I have read a forum post on Gamefaqs that the only way someone managed to "fix" it was to create a new game. Which isn't much of an option...
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615805-/63684942

Well, mixed emotions now as I seemed to have fixed it. My guess is that SomeWelshGuy is right, it was the mods - Sounds of Skyrim to be precise, which if I'd actually spent a bit more time looking I would've seen. I was just pissed at the game breaking. However, Bethesda is not truly out of blame here; as I'd never had problems with it before the 1.7 patch. I don't quite understand why they developed it this way, in that each update seems to break a ton of user created mods. I had to go back to a save where I'd never had SoS installed, and carry on from there.

My save file is still growing though - at a rate of about 0.02MB every so often. Is this normal? I'm feeling paranoid about it bloating again. My character is level 35 and the save file is currently 9.17MB. Also, I have a feeling that this thread ( http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1402912-dawnguard-the-mod-compatibility-list/ ) should be made a sticky on the Dawnguard forums, for at least a while.

Kieran_Nel, try what I did and see if that works? hopefully you save frequently.

Gradual save size increases is inevitable and normal.

Did you mean create a new Save File? That's what they say on the link.

No. I went back to an old one.
Cheers SomeWelshGuy, I'll stop worrying.