I'm not exactly sure how to describe my problem.

The games appears to be running ok in general, but from time to time I notice content isn't fully loaded or certain special effects are lagging behind. (With lag I'm not talking about fps drop, or experiencing a slowness/delay during gameplay)

A good example is the 3 stones (Thief, Mage and Warrior) you encounter along the path as you make your way towards Riverwoord.

At first I through I discovered a new areas for I was looking at only two stones but after 10~15 seconds the 3rd stone appeared along with a few other missing visual elements. As far as I could tell, the game didn't feel like it was struggling with loading content. Skyrimg is installed on a SSD so I doubt it has to do with a slow data access time.

I ignored this and continued playing and progress my way to Bleak Falls Barrow.
During combat I noticed that sounds like weapon hits or weapon deflection (block) played slightly delayed. And quite a few time I've killed my foe and a second or two later I hear his dying vocal cry along with his body and equipment dropping to the ground.

I'm experiencing these things with the stock build, this rules out possible mods causing the problems.
I never had this problem before with Skyrim early release, I've not played for a while and steam kept the game up to date.

A while back there was an odd archery bug, that when you fired an arrow, it didn't fire and a short while later it would fire, but I recall this got fixed or something for the problem went away. My problems i'm seeing right now some how feel similar to the other bug.

Any one know what could be wrong and how I might be able to fix it?

Regards,

Wild Cat

Maybe you're pushing your processor too hard?? I have issues that like perodically but they tend to be more visual things than sound related. What are your graphics settings for Skyrim?

My system is an i7 2600k core with a GTX285 Nvidia card and 8gb system memory. Able to run the graphic settings on maximum with out to much of a performance problem, but I'm on a custom setting of medium/high settings. The GTX285 when under full load produces quite a lot of noise, with the custom medium/high settings, things still look good enough for me and keep my GTX285 from kicking it in max fan speed for cooling. I'm pretty sure I'm not pushing my system to hard in any way.

It doesn't matter if you put your visual settings on Medium or High; your computer can still be having issues that you aren't aware of- like it can overheat even if you're playing it safe with the graphic settings. Are Steam and Skyrim running in Administrator mode, and do you play Skyrim online or in offline mode?