When I click "Play" in the Skyrim loader, it will launch into the game, start showing the Bethesda logo, then crash without any message to the desktop. I have removed all mods, ran the game at lowest settings, and updated my video card (Raedon HD 4850), and it still won't get past the Bethesda logo screen w/out crashing. Had minor crash issues over the last 255 hours of gameplay, but none game-breaking until this patch. I run Windows 7 64-bit on an Intel i5. Any idea on why this is crashing for me?

The last AMD drivers are buggy to Skyrim.

Revert to 12.1 drivers

It appears that the patch was corrupted when downloaded, and so I verified the game cache in steam and it redownloaded the entire game. Works fine, now.

I'm having this issue as well. I didn't realize an update occured (curse you Steam!!)...

Taking a look at other threads, seems more than a few people are having this problem. One theory is that the update rendered one or more popular mods useless.. currently trying a fresh reinstall of the game without mods... I'll post results once everything is done... mainly using this post as a placeholder and also re-enforcing that the op isn't alone here with this issue. I have already tried the amd catalyst uninstall/rollback to 12.1, still no go.

update: everything finally finished updating and such. deactivated all mods that auto update via steam and all manually added mods have been left out. I am now able to actually get into the game and start my save file, tho the game crashed while I was navigating the menus to quit out of skyrim anyways it's almost 2am for me tho, so I'm done for the night XD I'll try again tomorrow to see if I can start a new file to test stability. If all is stable, I'll try testing with a few mods, in increments until I'm back up to my old number, to see if I can isolate if mods did this and if so, what mod is the culprit. Someone mentioned "new kill animations" from this recent update... could it possibly be that the mods I have that modify the kill animations (maing them widely available, forcing 3rd person for each one, etc) caused it? We shall see.

Update to the update: New kill animations for unarmed are cool! You can suplex people now from behind or kick them in the daddy bags XD

Identified the following mods as causing the instant crash:
-"Half Elf" race from the workshop at http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=9886 . Downloading and installing the Racial compatibility mod from http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=10165 fixed this issue.

All is well! all other installed mods are giving no problem, and I'm using ALOT of mods XD

Bethesda, if you "Fix" Skyrim's crashing to desktop, freezes and lock ups in game, black screen freezes, loading screens freezess, and various other in game bugs we Skyrim players would have very high and proud faith in you again!