Hey all, I was approaching the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Abandoned_Prison when I realized I had never discovered it, let alone gone inside. From the road I could see the door clearly, as it was floating in the air some distance from the hillside. I made my way down past the fallen tree where I found Lucky Lorenz. Climbing the rocks and hopping down to the ledge of rock I could just get in range of the door floating overhead. Entering the prison proved a great surprise.

I could see a large slate-blue expanse with a square of water below and in front of me, a door floating up and beyond that, and other bits and pieces distributed in the void. I was also falling. I'd fall so far, then I was back just inside, but still below, the door. Luckily, I was able to exit the cell. This time I was standing on a paved platform outside the door. As I made my way back to the road, there was a shack crushed by the fallen tree.

I decided to leave the area and come back later. I didn't get far until the game crashed to the desktop (CTD). I read about the other entrance, and tried it. Again, it was the great void of disconnected interior places. If I tried to walk from one to another, I'd fall through. I used the Steam file integrity check, and at around 59% okay it said there was corrupted data that would be replaced by a download. I tried again, and everything checked out. Back in the game, however, the Abandoned Prison is still blown to pieces. I've never seen this in any other location. I'm playing the latest PC version.

Strange indeed.
I found that shortly after the game came out and explored it with no glitches or probs.

Welcome to the CTD club, hopefully this problem will be addressed in the next patch.

I've encountered the missing pieces several times. I haven't had the subsequent ctd, after the first go round because I've been saving, quitting, and goin to steam and verifying the cache. So far that's fixed it.

I've seen something just like this with my busted lvl 51/18mb save. I entered the Silver Blood Inn/Markarth, and was floating in a sea of blue, then slowly falling. I think I was able to finally go inside after restarting Skyrim, but that save is FUBAR for much anything else.

Thats the only time I've had this issue, except two occasions with missing textures, where only a restart was required to fix.

Sounds like what I ended up getting entering just about any indoor area. I'm sorry to say that it will most probably only get far, far worse.

Yes - this sounds like the bug that appears after you've played for a while. It is save file related- speculation is that it has to do with the size of the save file (people generally start to experience the problem after the save file reaches 15-16MB.). You may also experience reproducible CTDs entering dungeons and walking in certain areas. The problem only gets worse as time goes on. I've had a similar problem have given up the game until a fix is available (hopefully with the next patch but Bethesda hasn't said anything explicitly about this particular issue to my knowledge). If you start a new character or go back far enough the problems go away, but no doubt will return after putting more time in. Check out the last several pages of the "Crashes During Gameplay" sticky thread