During the quest to acquire the skull of corruption after a certain point in the quest any attempt to save (auto or hard) causes the game to crash.

Honestly I can recall only ever having done this quest once before, but don't remember having any problems that time.

Is anyone else having this problem? Does anyone know if this is related to the Dragonborn add-on (seeing as how that's the most recent and drastic change to my copy of Skyrim)?

I had a similiar bug before getting dragonborn. the only way I know around it is to go outside and then save.

Wrong forum, but it's a bug that's been present for a while with Skyrim. Pretty much you can either try to brute force a save through [spam quicksave keys] when you recover from one of the torpor stages, or just finish the quest without saving and then save after the quest is complete.

Trying to do that now. Just finish it and get outside without saving, but it's proving damn difficult

Just got the staff miraculously and then one of the orc invaders who didn't wake up killed me on my way out...ffs...