I recently had a catastrophic, Gotterdammerung of a rig failure. Like CPU, MOBO, HDD and PSU went to hell. Luckily I have a gaming laptop on which I can easily run Skyrim on high. But yesterday the big Beast came back with these specs;-

AMD FX8150 8 core Bulldozer @ 3.8Ghz sans overclock
ASUS Crosshair V Formula MOBO
Western Digital Cav Black 2TB @ 7200rpm
Corsair HX1050W Professional PSU
ATI Radeon 6970 2GB VRAM
8GB Corsair XMS3 RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium
Coolermaster HAF X Case (or refrigerator...hehe)

Lack of power is NOT the issue with that bad boy.

Now looking at some other threads in here it is very apparent that Steam was having baaaad issues yesterday. I reinstalled Steam with great difficulty and then I couldn't log in for ages. When I finally did, Skyrim took ages to download. Still, I eventually got it and added a minimal amount of mods, load order being something like this;-

Skyrim.esm
Dawnguard.esm
Update.esm
Both official Hi res esps
Ethereal Elven Overhaul
Eyes of Beauty
Female presets (one I made myself with the CK)

Also added SkyUI, e55 female replacer and Better Males (none of which do other than mesh/texture replace) and SKSE.

I always launch a new install with a minimum load, after all it worked on the lappy...

Game launched fine with either the Skyrim or SKSE launcher and man, did it look good and ran faster than one Mr Usain Bolt. But it would NOT save. Nope. My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves was nowhere to be seen, although I was able to click Save and autosaves were apparently going on.

So I verifed game cache and Steam seemed to find no problem. Still couldn't save.

Took a deep breath, cussed Steam and deleted all local content and am redownloading. This time it is going along nicely at a steady 1Mbps.

Do you think it is possible that something was corrupted during my first attempt at install?

Does anyone have any idea what can cause inability to save? Rig is brand new so it is not that!

Strange. If the My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves folder doesn't exist, did you try to manually create it?

Try this:

Open up the console with `
save
Exit the game and then search for the save file across all files and folders and partitions, including hidden files and folder. In other words, perform a system wide search with no restrictions.