I posted this in the community forums, possibly the wrong place for it, so I am posting here as well.

I just bought a 23" Asus full HD LCD monitor, 1920x1080 native resolution. 16:9 aspect ratio. If I play Skyrim on ANY resolution with 16:9 aspect ratio besides 1920x1080, I get black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Is that normal? Is there a way to get rid of it?

That's your monitor mate. Go through your monitor options an see if there is a setting for original aspect ratio, or something like that.

What graphics card do you have?

Try the scaling options in the NVIDIA panel settings under "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" or whatever graphics driver panel you have.

You can't change the aspect ratio on this monitor. It is set to 16:9.

Last night my video card was a GeForce 8800 Ultra, but after I build my new PC today it will be a GeForce GTX 570 1280MB, which should be able to run Skyim in that resolution just fine. I'd still like to know how to get rid of them though. There is NOTHING in the instruction manual for my monitor that talks about this.

Did you try this then?
If so, and it doesn't work , could you post exactly what model of Asus monitor you have and what version of Nvidia drivers you're using.

I will try later. It all might be meaningless once I get my new PC built..

I did discover you can change aspect ratio on this monitor but only if you are running in a resolution besides native resolution. I guess I just need to play around with it more.

Yeah that would be the best method for what you're trying to accomplish, if your monitor can be set to not automatically adjust the aspect ratio.
Otherwise, you may have to use the Nvidia scaling options instead, but its easier to set it in the monitor menu so you don't have to reset nvidia settings all the time when upgrading drivers.

The AMD CCC has a scaling option which will make all resolutions full screen on my monitor. For example 1024x768 will be stretched.

If I have it off, I can use my monitors aspect ratio settings. So I can have 1024x768 as it is with the letter boxing, or stretched to my monitor size.

Have a play around.

Mine does the same -- but using a 16:10 ratio goes full screen for some reason --- try using 1680x1050 or 1440x900 under the 16:10 options and they should be full screen -- not sure why the other 16:9 resolutions go to letterbox but using 1680x1050 on my 5770 with an Acer 23" 1920x1080 monitor reduces the resolution enough to get good results and it runs full screen (no letterbox) so give it a try.

Thanks for the replies all. I really appreciate the input.

One thing to keep in mind, there are 16:10 and 16:9 monitors. The 16:9 is a movie widescreen (and HD TV) and the other is just widescreen. Some monitors natively use one aspect ratio or the other. If you choose a non native aspect ratio, then you will get black bars.

You can fix this by selecting "show unsupported resolutions" in the launcher and choosing a resolution that matches the aspect ratio of the monitor you have.

This solution worked perfectly. I just chose 16:10 ratio in the Skyrim launcher and chose one of the lower resolutions that my current video card can handle, and it was full screen. Thanks for the help all.