The word around the internets is that alt-tabbing your game can cause the water to lose its surface texture and go clear as a glass of seltzer. It looks like [censored] because you can see through hundreds of feet of ocean, at the ugly tiling on the seabed.

Well my water looks like that all the time! Even before I alt-tab and without any mods!

http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r162/obscreens/2012-03-04_00001.jpg

Help!

I play on low settings mostly, with some of the reflections turned on. I have an ATI HD Mobility 3650.

Try increasing your settings.

@ OP

Have you turned Transparency Multisampling on?

Please explain this.

Have you turned that feature on in the nvidia control panel?

Is that really only a 128 meg of Video Ram??GDR 3?...and the game loads...count your blessings.

Turn off Shadows....lower everything you can...the MIN for the Game Skyrim...512 VRAM.

Edit: to say...the game is turning off everything it can to keep running....

Heck, no. It's a 512MB card, and the game runs just fine. Better than Oblivion on high settings, at any rate.

And obviously, I don't have an Nvidia control panel.

Edit: Putting settings on medium kills the framerate for no appreciable boost in graphics, but does nothing for the water. Still no textures on it.

well the equivalent of the nvidia control panel then for ATI.

Just find the setting and turn it off if you can. It causes transparent water and creatures when nvidia users have it on so may be the same with ATI.

No success in that department.

There are so many good water mods out there, but none will work.

Go to My Documents>My Games>Skyrim and delete Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini. Verify Integrity of Game Cache by right clicking on Skyrim in the Steam Library, selecting properties, switching to the Local Files tab, and clicking the appropriate button. In the Skyrim Launcher it will now reset your graphic settings to a recommended configuration. Go to the graphic options and choose the settings you really want. Make sure no mods are on, or perhaps even installed or subscribed(for now) under Data Files. Push Exit so the new configurations are permanently saved, then run the launcher again and start the game.

If this doesn't work, uninstall your graphic drivers using the control panel. After a restart use a program such as Driver Sweeper to remove all traces of graphic driver files and registry settings. Install the latest drivers for your card, could use this http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx to make sure you get the right ones.

I guess if that doesn't work, uninstall Skyrim and delete the Skyrim folder in steamapps>common, then reinstall Skyrim.

i'm assuming this means you've had some installed. if so - the first thing to do would be to make sure there are no files from these mods remaining in your skyrim directory. check what files they install and delete them if any remain.