Occasionally while I'm playing Skyrim it will minimize and take me to the desktop. Then I have to ALT-TAB to get back to the game. I play the game using an xbox360 controller, and my desktop and mouse just sit on my desk. I don't understand how it minimizes; has this happened to anyone else?

Sounds like a background task running. Make sure you don't have any running or a scheduled task. An example being HP's printer driver update thing which checks periodically for updates.

Yeah it sometimes happens to me, I dont know what causes it either.