Hello, I've been playing Skyrim with short breaks since Christmas, and I've never had any issues with the game until recently.
Around 2-3 weeks ago, the game started randomly freezing, it only happens when I enter a new location - a house, dungeon, outdoor locations as well (farm, mill...).

The screen completely freezes, though background sounds and music keep playing. The only thing I can do, is to Ctrl-alt-delete and forcefully shut it down (the program is listed as "not responding" in task manager when I do so).

The occurence of this bug happening is completely random. Yesterday I played like 6 hours whole afternoon, no issues. Today it froze twice over the course of 30 minutes.

I haven't made any changes to my computer's hardware or software, also I have many other games installed and they all run perfectly fine.
I do not have any mods installed at all.

As an added annoyance, after I shut down Skyrim, the Steam starts going through "synchronizing", sometimes for several minutes, which prevents me from launching Skyrim while the stupid synchronizing is going on.

My computer is: Intel Core i7 860, 4 gb ram, Ati Radeon HD 8500, Windows 7 SP1.

Thanks for any help.

Hi, this looks very much like the issue I and several others had after updating to last patch. Have you tried to reinstall the game? That fixed it for me and others as well. It still crashes, but very rarely. And the "crash on loading" bug seems to be gone.